C. M. Kornbluth 23 min read

A short-tempered Martian Matriarch, nicked while trimming her tentacles, threatens to blow water-logged Venus out of space over mining rights, and the whole mess is on.

C. M. Kornbluth's 1942 story spins a comic interplanetary crisis from a fashion accident and a queen's bad temper, escalating a spat over free electrons into a threat of war. Fast, funny early Kornbluth space opera. Read it for a genial golden-age farce where cosmic conflict turns on a very small cut.

In its time

Published in 1942, during the 1940s, the golden age begins.

Reading it

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

Illustrated by

Hannes Bok