Robert Moore Williams 45 min read

On dusty, yellow-dusted Mars, Jim Ronson comes on the strangest mission of all, to find Les Ro, who trades new lamps for old, and whose lamps are the lamps of life itself.

Robert Moore Williams's 1957 story is an atmospheric colonization and first-contact tale steeped in Martian mystery. Vivid, evocative golden-age SF. Read it for a story that reworks the Aladdin legend on a dying Mars, where an old trader deals in life and death.

In its time

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

Reading it

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