Alfred Coppel 20 min read

Gold, lust, and cost, the ancient trilogy of treasure, undoes a space crew, and leaves the narrator a yellow mask on rickety bones.

Alfred Coppel's 1949 story frames its tale of greed in space as a grim meditation stretching from Jason's Argo to the conquest of the void, narrated by a wrecked survivor. Dark, atmospheric space opera about the price of treasure. Read it for a brooding golden-age cautionary tale that knows exactly what avarice costs.

In its time

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

Reading it

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

Illustrated by

Al McWilliams