Philip K. Dick 35 min read

An important Earth garrison on Asteroid Y-3 faces a biological impossibility, men becoming plants. 'Just why do you think you're a plant, Corporal?' the base doctor gently asks.

Philip K. Dick's 1953 story is a clever, unsettling first-contact and colonization tale of a strange contagion of the mind. Sharp, characteristically Dickian golden-age SF. Read it for an early gem where soldiers on a remote asteroid start turning, contentedly, into vegetation.

In its time

Published in 1953, during the 1950s, post-war optimism meets cold war anxiety.

Reading it

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