Mari Wolf 33 min read

Night after night, aging Lewis and Martha watch the Earth rise over an alien desert like a bright morning star, and Martha says quietly, again, that she wants to go home.

Mari Wolf's 1953 story is a poignant first-contact and social-SF tale. Tender, wistful golden-age SF. Read it for a quietly affecting story of exiles growing old far from Earth, and the ache of home in a changing universe, in a gentle, humane meditation on belonging and the passage of time.

In its time

Published in 1953, during the 1950s, post-war optimism meets cold war anxiety.

Reading it

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

Illustrated by

Bob Martin