George O. Smith 43 min read

Sixty centuries after Sargon of Akkad thought his Mesopotamia the center of the universe, men reach the stars and find Mars once held a civilization at its peak four thousand years before Christ.

George O. Smith's 1943 story is an ingenious hard-SF and time-travel tale of recovered ancient technology. Clever, wide-ranging golden-age SF. Read it for a story that spans sixty centuries, from a Bronze Age king to spacefarers deciphering the lost arts of Mars.

In its time

Published in 1943, during the 1940s, the golden age begins.

Reading it

43 min read (a novelette, room for a turn or two).

Illustrated by

Paul Orban