Stephen Barr 1 hr 8 min read

She traveled from life to death and back like a commuter on the 5:15, except each trip brought her nearer the beginning of the line.

Stephen Barr's 1958 story is an inventive, cerebral first-contact and social-SF tale. Clever, strange golden-age SF. Read it for an ingenious story, cast as a formal report, of an alien visitor who is not quite an individual, and whose repeated journeys run uncannily backward toward a beginning.

In its time

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

Reading it

1 hr 8 min read (a novelette, room for a turn or two).

Illustrated by

Diane Dillon