Evan Hunter 15 min read

The great ship settles onto the Martian sand, and Cal and Dave, the first men to reach the red planet, peer through the viewport with guns trained, braced for whatever, or whoever, awaits them.

Evan Hunter's 1952 story is a sharp first-contact space opera. Clever, ironic golden-age SF. Read it for an early story by the future author of The Blackboard Jungle (and Ed McBain), a tense first landing on Mars that turns on a neat reversal of expectations, in a well-turned golden-age piece about who is really welcoming whom.

In its time

Published in 1952, during the 1950s, post-war optimism meets cold war anxiety.

Reading it

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