Ray Van Houten 25 min read

Peetn draws his cloak about his furry shoulders as the Martian sun sinks and the wind throbs deeper, then stalks up the slope, against the raging cold, to the hollow where he goes each night.

Ray Van Houten's 1942 story is a poignant first-contact and post-apocalyptic tale of a dying world. Atmospheric, melancholy golden-age SF. Read it for a moody, evocative story of the last of the Martians clinging to life on a frigid, wind-scoured planet, in a quiet meditation on endings.

In its time

Published in 1942, during the 1940s, the golden age begins.

Reading it

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

Illustrated by

Leo Morey