Mary Elizabeth Counselman 23 min read

Tall, bronzed, fair-haired Conquistadors stride down the gangplank onto steamy new S'zetnu, watched from the pallid forest by many eyes, wistful and excited, but rheumy with disease and nearly blind.

Mary Elizabeth Counselman's 1951 story is a haunting colonization and first-contact tale with a moral sting. Sharp, evocative golden-age SF. Read it for a story that casts humanity's splendid star-conquerors as the conquistadors of old, and asks what they truly bring to the sickly natives who watch them come.

In its time

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

Reading it

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

Illustrated by

Hank Kass