Survey Team: The Last Hope of Mankind

Earth is dying. Thirty years of war have turned the surface into ash, radioactive dust, and the rusted remains of cities. The survivors live underground, raising children who have never seen sunlight and knowing their sealed tunnels cannot keep them alive forever. Mars is the last possibility. Halloway, Young, and a small survey team are sent to determine whether humanity can start over there.

What they find is hardly the untouched world they hoped for. Mars is covered with abandoned cities, enormous mining pits, corroded machinery, and launch towers left behind by a civilization that stripped the planet almost bare. Then the team discovers records explaining what happened to the Martians—and where they went. Suddenly their mission becomes something far stranger than choosing a new home.

Survey Team is Philip K. Dick at his early best, beginning with a desperate expedition and steadily turning a ruined planet into a mystery with implications far beyond Mars. Every discovery gives the men another reason to keep searching, even when the evidence suggests that finding another world may not solve the problem they are trying to escape.

Philip K. Dick (1928–1982) published Survey Team in Fantastic Universe in 1954, during the extraordinarily productive period when his short fiction appeared throughout American science fiction magazines. He went on to write The Man in the High Castle, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Ubik, and dozens of other novels and stories, becoming one of the most influential science fiction writers of the 20th century.