Ben Bova 32 min read

The first man in space wakes 22,500 miles out, alone, with the fate of the world planted in his hypnotized mind.

Ben Bova's 1960 story finds Tom groping back from a hypnotic trance in orbit, armed only with post-hypnotic instructions and a terrible gamble to make from the edge of space. Taut, hard-SF suspense from a writer who would become one of the field's great editors and popularizers. Read it for lean, tense space-age drama about one man and an impossible decision, far from home.

In its time

Published in 1960, during the 1960s, new wave revolutionizes the genre.

Reading it

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

Illustrated by

Leo Summers