Roger Zelazny

“A Rose for Ecclesiastes” is a short story by Roger Zelazny, published in November 1963 in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. It tells the story of Gallinger, a brilliant poet and linguist from Earth who travels to Mars to study the culture of its ancient inhabitants. His extraordinary gift for languages makes him the first human to gain access to the sacred records of the Martians, a matriarchal society built on ancestral texts and traditions laden with symbolism and a somber philosophical background. Fascinated by this legacy, Gallinger enters into a cultural dialogue that will reveal to him an ancient prophecy.