Robert Abernathy 22 min read

In New York's Martian Museum, scientist James Dalton pauses before a new exhibit, the preserved body of a Man from Mars, and behind it, a Martian record holds the song of a forgotten creature.

Robert Abernathy's 1954 story is an atmospheric first-contact and social-SF tale of alien archaeology. Sharp, evocative golden-age SF. Read it for a story where the relics of a dead Martian civilization yield a chilling record, and the memory of the creature called Currupira reaches unnervingly toward the present.

In its time

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

Reading it

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