Mark Clifton 21 min read

On an abandoned Martian field hangs a man's empty spacesuit, stuffed with straw and suspended from a tower, a scarecrow, a Kilroy, an act no departing crewman will explain.

Mark Clifton's 1962 story opens on a haunting image and builds a sharp colonization-and-social-SF meditation on humanity's carelessness with worlds. Pointed, thoughtful golden-age SF. Read it for a story that reads a single strange gesture as an indictment of how we treat the planets we touch.

In its time

Published in 1962, during the 1960s, new wave revolutionizes the genre.

Reading it

21 min read (a short story, a single idea, delivered and gone).

Illustrated by

Virgil Finlay