Raymond F. Jones 56 min read

'As soon as I'm well we'll go to Mars again,' Alice used to say, but now she is dead, the surgeons say she was not even human, and Mel Hastings knows they were never off Earth.

Raymond F. Jones's 1961 story is a gripping colonization and social-SF mystery. Sharp, unsettling golden-age SF. Read it for a story where a grieving reporter confronts an impossible contradiction between his cherished memories and the terrible truth on the operating table, and must unravel the memory of Mars.

In its time

Published in 1961, during the 1960s, new wave revolutionizes the genre.

Reading it

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

Illustrated by

Virgil Finlay