Joseph Shallit 44 min read

At the spaceport window, Ruth exults over the dazzling green-and-gold fields of a heavenly new world, and her husband Harvey's chest fills with joy, though something is not quite right.

Joseph Shallit's 1956 story is a sharp first-contact and social-SF tale. Clever, unsettling golden-age SF. Read it for a story where a colonist couple's rapture at a paradise-planet shadows toward a darker truth, building through dawning unease toward revelation, in a well-turned golden-age piece about assumption, appearance, and the danger of reasoning from a wrong analogy.

In its time

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

Reading it

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

Illustrated by

Paul Orban