Eando Binder 12 min read

A grinning little man in a battered space tub joins the long pilgrimage of ships descending to a frozen, long-dead world, the ancient, original home of the human race, Earth.

Eando Binder's 1954 story is a thoughtful post-apocalyptic and social-SF tale. Sharp, evocative golden-age SF. Read it for a story of far-future humans returning as tourists to an abandoned Earth, and one man's peculiar mission there, in a wry, resonant golden-age meditation on heritage, reverence, and the violators of a sacred past.

In its time

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

Reading it

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

Illustrated by

Joseph Eberle