Raymond Z. Gallun 54 min read

A homesteading family unpacks a prefab house on the tiny asteroid Vesta, and confronts the terrible starkness of their new frontier.

Raymond Z. Gallun's 1951 story lands John Endlich, his weeping children, and his uneasy wife on an airless rock to build a life, the reality of desolation sinking in past everything they knew beforehand. Humane, grounded space opera about the hard edge of the space frontier. Read it for realistic, family-centered golden-age SF about the cost of homesteading the void.

In its time

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

Reading it

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