Fritz Leiber 21 min read

A dark star has torn Earth from the sun; a boy fetches frozen air by the pailful for the last family alive.

Fritz Leiber's 1951 masterpiece imagines a world flung into eternal night, its atmosphere fallen as snow, where a small family survives in a heated 'Nest', until the boy glimpses a face in the frozen dark. A tender, ingenious post-catastrophe story that finds warmth and hope in the coldest premise in science fiction. Read it for one of the genre's most beloved shorts, hard science and human heart in perfect balance.

In its time

Published in 1951, during the 1950s, post-war optimism meets cold war anxiety.

Reading it

21 min read (a short story, a single idea, delivered and gone).

Illustrated by

Ed Emshwiller