Fox B. Holden 16 min read

Markten flies low over the sun-lit ruins, wondering idly if he'll find any more than he found elsewhere on the dead planet, New City's twelve million already enough, as far as he's concerned.

Fox B. Holden's 1951 story is a thoughtful AI-and-post-apocalyptic tale of a world after humanity. Sharp, evocative golden-age SF. Read it for a quietly unsettling story where the surveyors of a ruined Earth ponder its vanished builders, and slowly reveal just who, or what, is now doing the building.

In its time

Published in 1951, during the 1950s, post-war optimism meets cold war anxiety.

Reading it

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