Basil Wells 26 min read

The crippled Sun Maiden plunges sunward with meteor-smashed jets, her exhausted crew fighting to repair the unrepairable before she falls into Venus.

Basil Wells's 1949 story opens amid desperate spacesuited labor as a dying ship's patched rockets fail one by one over the Wet Planet. Fast, tense golden-age space opera about a doomed vessel and the men who won't stop fighting her. Read it for hard-driving disaster-in-space SF with a strong sense of mechanical peril.

In its time

Published in 1949, during the 1940s, the golden age begins.

Reading it

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