Leigh Brackett 41 min read

Convicts building a haven on searing Mercury feel the first blue fire of a weapon that fastens on gun-butts and knuckles.

Leigh Brackett's 1941 story sets war-hardened prisoners like Mel Gray toiling under Mercury's huge sun, sweat and thirst and bitterness giving way to violence and the birth of something new. Early Brackett, already rich with the muscular romanticism and vivid worlds that made her the queen of planetary adventure. Read it for atmospheric, hard-edged golden-age space opera from a genre great finding her voice.

In its time

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

Reading it

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