Rog Phillips 22 min read

A movie-cameraman in a pith helmet screams at his beautiful model to pose against a fragment of inscribed wall, amid the ancient ruins of a Mars whose old inhabitants are long gone. Or are they?

Rog Phillips's 1952 story is a sharp colonization and first-contact tale. Clever, atmospheric golden-age SF. Read it for a story that opens on the crass exploitation of Martian ruins for a photo shoot, and turns on the unsettling question of whether the old Martians are truly as dead as they seem.

In its time

Published in 1952, during the 1950s, post-war optimism meets cold war anxiety.

Reading it

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