Jerome Bixby 13 min read

Once there was water in the canal, but now Kinkaaka clings to the dry bank, its terraces like tragic brows over the dead slope, the ancient Martian town, its 'native' section under Earth's conquest.

Jerome Bixby's 1950 story is an atmospheric, melancholy colonization and first-contact tale. Evocative, sharp golden-age SF. Read it for a moody story of a dying Mars under human occupation, where the crumbling grandeur of a native city frames a pointed reckoning with what conquest costs the conquered.

In its time

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

Reading it

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

Illustrated by

Earl Mayan