Charles L. Fontenay 24 min read

A traveling salesman whose territory is the whole solar system, Peache loves Mars best of all, its gentle gravity, its people, and, one lucky day in 2081, an extraordinary experience.

Charles L. Fontenay's 1958 story is a warm, wry social-SF space opera. Clever, humane golden-age SF. Read it for a genial story of an interplanetary salesman and the woman whose influence shapes a man's life in unexpected ways, in a well-turned golden-age piece with a gentle heart and a satisfying, human-scale twist.

In its time

Published in 1958, during the 1950s, post-war optimism meets cold war anxiety.

Reading it

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

Illustrated by

John Schoenherr