Rog Phillips 22 min read

At the 75th banquet of the Retired Space Captains, a ninety-five-year-old newcomer joins the club, still in the prime of a very long life.

Rog Phillips's 1957 story convenes RETSCAP high in a future Manhattan skyscraper in 2231, welcoming Captain Arthur Peabody, retired by age into a fellowship of old spacers. Wry, expansive golden-age SF with a strong sense of a lived-in future. Read it for genial far-future SF steeped in the camaraderie of the men who flew the spaceways.

In its time

Published in 1957, during the 1950s, post-war optimism meets cold war anxiety.

Reading it

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

Illustrated by

Ernest Kurt Barth