Rog Phillips 15 min read

When his student rushes over with a headline, ROBOT ROCKET SHIP TO MARS, genial Professor Gordon Marlow little suspects how the news connects to the humble carrots and cabbages in his own garden.

Rog Phillips's 1948 story is an inventive first-contact and hard-SF tale. Clever, thought-provoking golden-age SF. Read it for a story that finds a startling alien perspective in the most ordinary of settings, turning a garden and a Mars rocket toward a fresh meditation on intelligence, life, and what it means to think.

In its time

Published in 1948, during the 1940s, the golden age begins.

Reading it

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

Illustrated by

W. E. Terry