Stanley Gimble 10 min read

A test pilot suits up for a historic flight while his wife sits rigid on the not-quite-theirs couch, chain-smoking, she got her wish, but not what she wanted.

Stanley Gimble's 1955 story catches the excited Phil Conover and his anxious wife at the threshold of a mission that will change everything between them. Tender, tense social SF about ambition, marriage, and the cost of a dream. Read it for a quietly affecting golden-age story about the people left waiting on the ground.

In its time

Published in 1955, during the 1950s, post-war optimism meets cold war anxiety.

Reading it

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

Illustrated by

Kelly Freas