While their teacher is briefly out of the room, William pushes and taunts Margot, but she doesn’t respond, continuing to stare out the classroom window. On the day the sun is set to appear, these tensions are close to a boiling point. For Margot, life on Venus is all but unbearable and the sun is all-important, and she makes no secret of these feelings. To some extent, Margot seems to have brought this isolation upon herself, because she refuses to participate in games or songs unless they relate to the sun. This is typical torment for Margot: the other children tend to tease her or avoid her, because they envy her childhood on Earth and the fact that her parents may even spend thousands of dollars to move her back there. Margot finds herself the object of teasing when William, a boy in her class, tries to antagonize her by claiming she didn’t write the poem she shared with the class. Margot has not taken well to her new home on Venus: she is frail, quiet, and pale, as if “the rain had washed out the blue from her eyes and the red from her mouth and the yellow from her hair.” Lately, she has begun to panic at the touch of water.Īs the two-hour summer approaches, the schoolchildren read and write short stories about the sun. Unlike most of the children, Margot lived on Earth until five years ago, so while they all speculate about what the sun is like, Margot can actually remember quite well. After seven long years, today is the day that scientists predict the sun will make its brief appearance indeed, the rain seems to be slowing. When the story opens, a group of nine-year-old children are gathered excitedly by the window of their underground classroom. Humans live underground in a network of tunnels, eagerly awaiting the very brief summer. The planet is covered with thick jungles and unruly weeds, perpetually caught in a cycle of growth and destruction. The rest of the time, it rains-all day, every day. Venus has a peculiar climate: every seven years, the sun comes out for just two hours. “All Summer in a Day” takes place on the planet Venus, a generation after the first colonists from Earth arrived there.
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