Malcolm Jameson 29 min read

A lone interplanetary trader lands on rain-soaked Venus to spring a fellow spaceman from a colonial shakedown.

Malcolm Jameson drops us into Venusberg, grass huts, torrential downpours, coolies hauling sedan chairs through the muck, where Captain Hank Karns, the Lone Trader, arrives to sort out charges against an old comrade and smells petty corruption at work. Pure 1941 pulp: a rough-and-ready spacefaring frontier, an independent skipper who trusts his own wits, and the interplanetary swagger of the golden age. Read it for atmospheric solar-system adventure of the era when Venus was still a steaming jungle world.

In its time

Published in 1941, during the 1940s, the golden age begins.

Reading it

29 min read (a novelette, room for a turn or two).