Jack Sharkey 25 min read

A writer's agent lands him the plum job of going along on the first trip to Mars, to give the public the human slant, though the writer suspects he'll be locked up the whole voyage and told nothing.

Jack Sharkey's 1960 story is a wry, comic colonization and first-contact tale. Fun, genial golden-age SF. Read it for a breezy story where a hack scribbler tags along on humanity's first Mars expedition to write it up, and the human-interest angle proves stranger than any scientific report.

In its time

Published in 1960, during the 1960s, new wave revolutionizes the genre.

Reading it

25 min read (a novelette, room for a turn or two).

Illustrated by

Wallace Wood