Robert Silverberg 32 min read

Home after five years in space, Rolf Dekker stares in disbelief at the earless young Earther approaching his tumbledown shack, and then at another, with gleaming two-inch horns on his forehead.

Robert Silverberg's 1957 story is a sharp social-SF space opera of a spacer estranged from a changed Earth. Vivid, thoughtful golden-age SF. Read it for early Silverberg, a returning astronaut confronting a homeworld of bizarre bodily fashions that has left his kind behind, in a poignant tale of belonging and obsolescence.

In its time

Published in 1957, during the 1950s, post-war optimism meets cold war anxiety.

Reading it

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