Stephen Marlowe 21 min read

Only the shells of deserted mud-brick houses greet Steve Cantwell when he returns to his childhood village on Sirius' second planet, the well, the four bare walls, all he remembers, now empty.

Stephen Marlowe's 1957 story steeps its colonization space opera in the ache of a ruined homecoming. Atmospheric, wistful golden-age SF. Read it for a story about returning to a childhood home on an alien world and finding only dust and memory waiting.

In its time

Published in 1957, during the 1950s, post-war optimism meets cold war anxiety.

Reading it

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