Landis's "Falling Onto Mars" online

Posted by MacDood
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Comment: It's short so just read it
Geoff Landis's Hugo-nominated (and very good) (and very short) short story, Falling Onto Mars, is online in a variety of formats (and the Hugo ballot closes shortly!).

The people of the planet Mars have no literature. The colonization of Mars was unforgiving, and the exiles had no time to spend in writing. But still they have stories, the tales they told to children too young to really understand, stories that these children tell to their own children. These are the legends of the Martians.

Not one of the stories is a love story.

In those days, people fell out of the sky. They fell through the ochre sky in ships that were barely functional, thin aluminum shells crowded with fetid humanity, half of them corpses and the other half little more than corpses. The landings were hard, and many of the ships split open on impact, spilling bodies and precious air into the barely-more-than-vacuum of Mars. And still they fell, wave after wave of ships, the refuse of humanity tossed carelessly through space and falling onto the cratered deserts of Mars.

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(Thanks, Geoff!) [Boing Boing]