Mike Curry 6 min read

Twenty-five years alone, and a ship appears in the summer sky, from Earth! But the ordered man Arak Miller keeps his thoughts calm: probably just a routine survey, nothing to do with him.

Mike Curry's 1954 story is a poignant colonization and social-SF tale of solitude. Sharp, humane golden-age SF. Read it for a quietly affecting story of a man marooned for a quarter century on a distant world, and the surge of hope and dread when at last a ship comes from the home he was cut off from.

In its time

Published in 1954, during the 1950s, post-war optimism meets cold war anxiety.

Reading it

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