Arnold Castle 29 min read

A senator who chairs the Committee on Extraterrestrial Development flies home to politics as usual, and something more.

Arnold Castle's 1958 story follows Vance Duran through the reporters and dinners of a homecoming trip, the machinery of near-future space policy grinding around a man who suspects the young and imaginative will be the ones to inherit the stars. A thoughtful, understated piece of social SF about vision, bureaucracy, and generational change. Read it for a quietly optimistic golden-age take on who really opens the frontier.

In its time

Published in 1958, during the 1950s, post-war optimism meets cold war anxiety.

Reading it

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

Illustrated by

Paul Orban