Stephen Bartholomew 21 min read

At ninety-one, Martin Devere is the oldest man on Mars, and for years the only man on Mars, until, today, a second rocket comes down in a puff of dust across the desert from his igloo.

Stephen Bartholomew's 1963 story is a poignant colonization and first-contact tale of solitude. Sharp, humane golden-age SF. Read it for a story of a self-exiled archaeologist grown old alone on the red planet, and how the arrival of another human being disrupts a hermit's long, deliberate isolation.

In its time

Published in 1963, during the 1960s, new wave revolutionizes the genre.

Reading it

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

Illustrated by

Virgil Finlay