David E. Fisher 14 min read

An old man wanders the slopes below Melopolis, musing on the gods in whose names Man killed and plundered while climbing upward, and finally left Earth to seek his cousins among the stars.

David E. Fisher's 1957 story is a lyrical, melancholy social-SF space opera. Thoughtful, elegiac golden-age SF. Read it for a wistful far-future story, rich with the imagery of a lost pastoral world, that meditates on humanity's long climb, its gods, and the loneliness it found among the stars.

In its time

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

Reading it

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