Bryce Walton 54 min read

After sixteen years alone with his wife on a space station, Kane returns to Earth, surprised anyone finds it remarkable, and puzzled the authorities have abandoned the station and the Mars project.

Bryce Walton's 1956 story is a sharp dystopian social-SF tale of a changed and complacent world. Clever, unsettling golden-age SF. Read it for a story where a man long absent in space comes home to find humanity's outward drive gone, and the happy herd contentedly grazing on something he cannot accept.

In its time

Published in 1956, during the 1950s, post-war optimism meets cold war anxiety.

Reading it

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

Illustrated by

Ed Emshwiller