Leslie Perri 43 min read

A newsman studies a photo of a visiting Martian lady at an embassy tea, and realizes with a chill that, under her Rio couture, she is a carbon copy of every other woman.

Leslie Perri's 1956 story is a sharp social-SF space opera. Pointed, unsettling golden-age SF. Read it for a thoughtful story that finds creeping dread in the erosion of difference and individuality, told by a woman writer at a time when few worked in the field, in a well-turned golden-age piece about conformity and the loss of what makes us distinct.

In its time

Published in 1956, during the 1950s, post-war optimism meets cold war anxiety.

Reading it

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

Illustrated by

Robert Engle