Edward Bellamy 23 min read

A stargazing professor suffers a spell of vertigo and finds his mind carried to Mars, where the inhabitants possess a faculty Earthmen lack, and pity us as the dwellers in a blindman's world.

Edward Bellamy's 1886 story, by the author of 'Looking Backward,' is a thoughtful psi-powers and social-SF tale. Elegant, provocative, philosophical. Read it for a fine early idea-story where Martians can see the future as we see the past, and Earth's blindness to what is coming is revealed as a strange and pitiable affliction.

In its time

Published in 1886, during the 1880s, lost races and dying earths.

Reading it

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