Edward W. Ludwig 55 min read

A haunted spaceman flees across three planets with a dead man's shadow at his heels.

Edward Ludwig's 1956 story ushers Ben Curtis into the Blast Inn, a gloriously seedy Venusian gin mill thick with tobacco smoke and Martian Devil's Egg, pursued by fear and, it seems, by the dead. Vivid, feverish planetary-noir pulp, all polyglot spaceports and red-skinned urchins and a fugitive who can't outrun what's chasing him. Read it for atmospheric interplanetary chase fiction, dripping with the seedy glamour of the golden-age solar system.

In its time

Published in 1956, during the 1950s, post-war optimism meets cold war anxiety.

Reading it

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

Illustrated by

Ed Emshwiller