Fredric Brown 6 min read

With Earth overcrowded and Mars empty, someone starts a colony, reshaping the immigrants' very bodies to survive the Red Planet. Every factor was covered, except one flaw of human nature.

Fredric Brown's 1954 story is a sharp, ironic colonization and social-SF tale with a stinging final turn. Clever, compressed golden-age SF from a master. Read it for a story about a perfectly engineered colony undone by the one thing its planners couldn't reshape.

In its time

Published in 1954, during the 1950s, post-war optimism meets cold war anxiety.

Reading it

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

Illustrated by

Ernest Schroeder