Tom Leahy 11 min read

On Mars, bored little Marilou torments a burrowing sand dog, then, satisfied she holds its whole future in her whim, digs it out again and magnanimously tells it to go on and live.

Tom Leahy's 1958 story builds a quietly chilling first-contact and colonization tale from a colonist child's idle cruelty. Sharp, unsettling golden-age SF. Read it for a story where a little girl's careless afternoon with a Martian creature carries a darker weight than she knows.

In its time

Published in 1958, during the 1950s, post-war optimism meets cold war anxiety.

Reading it

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