Leslie F. Stone's "The Human Pets of Mars" (1936)

Originally appearing in the Vol. 10, No. 12, October 1936 issue of Amazing Stories, "The Human Pets of Mars," a novelette by Leslie F. Stone, is an influential, but controversial, piece of early Martian science fiction.

The novelette has a seemingly simple story line: Martians land on a golf course at Haines Point, Washington, D.C., and capture a small group of humans, transporting them back to Mars, where they are kept as pets. After a short but abusive captivity, the humans steal a Martian spaceship and make their way back to Earth. At the story’s conclusion, one of the former captives declares: “I’m going to make a life work of freeing every animal pet in the land!”

Yet, as Isaac Asimov points out in his Before the Golden Age: A Science Fiction Anthology of the 1930’s (1974), “This story ... does not hold up on rereading as well as many of the other stories in this book did, and I am keenly embarrassed by the simple-minded portrayal of the Blacks in the tale. Yet I well remember thinking the story was absolutely great when I read it for the first time. ... It was sometime in late 1936, encouraged, I believe, by my pleasure in The Human Pets of Mars, that I could finally resist no more. I had grown tired of the endless pages of my fantasy, which was getting nowhere, and I decided to try, for the very first time, science fiction!”

A detailed analysis of the racial elements of Stone’s novelette is “Race and Color Coding in Leslie F. Stone's The Human Pets of Mars: Reflections for the Repertoire of the Multicultural Classroom,” a scholarly article by Batya Weinbaum (1997).

As one of the first woman writers to have her work published in science fiction magazines, Leslie F. Stone was an important sci-fi pioneer. A short biographical sketch of her appears in Partners in Wonder: Women and the Birth of Science Fiction 1926-1965, by Eric Leif Davin (2006).