Stephen Marlowe 42 min read

The fairgrounds throng with drifter-families waiting for tomorrow's blast-off, and old Gramps, spindly-legged and utterly out of place on the Martian landscape, comes running to meet the narrator.

Stephen Marlowe's 1951 story is a wistful space-opera tale of a vanishing generation. Sharp, poignant golden-age SF. Read it for a tender story where a rootless people prepares to launch outward again, and an old man who belongs to an earlier, homestead age clings to the old way in a world moving on without him.

In its time

Published in 1951, during the 1950s, post-war optimism meets cold war anxiety.

Reading it

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