Bryce Walton 25 min read

The sun glares, the thin air seems friendless, and the sands waver with a terrible insubstantiality before Madeleine's eyes, even the Ruins of Taovahr, on a false and disappointing Mars, feel false.

Bryce Walton's 1953 story is an atmospheric, melancholy colonization and psi-powers tale. Vivid, evocative golden-age SF. Read it for a moody story of a woman's disillusionment with a tourist-trap Mars stripped of its dreamed-of romance, and the strange, deeper truth that stirs beneath the false surface.

In its time

Published in 1953, during the 1950s, post-war optimism meets cold war anxiety.

Reading it

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