Robert Silverberg 23 min read

'The surest way to die out here on Mars is to give up,' the narrator tells his wife Val as they trudge across the sand, their sandcat broken, and Death to all Terrans in the air.

Robert Silverberg's 1956 story is a taut colonization and adventure tale of survival on a hostile Mars. Sharp, gripping golden-age SF. Read it for early Silverberg, a married couple fighting for their lives across the Martian desert, amid rising native hostility and the deadly indifference of the planet itself.

In its time

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

Reading it

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