William J. Brittain 10 min read

The land is dark in the softly falling rain as a crew unloads a great silver spaceship, apprehensive of the stark ruins sprawling across the flat land beside the broad river a mile away.

William J. Brittain's 1948 story is an atmospheric first-contact and post-apocalyptic tale. Moody, evocative golden-age SF. Read it for a somber story where explorers set down beside the vast wreckage of a dead civilization, and the quiet dread of the ruins builds toward an unsettling discovery.

In its time

Published in 1948, during the 1940s, the golden age begins.

Reading it

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

Illustrated by

H. W. Kiemle