Walter M. Miller 30 min read

The way a man has lived is often the key to how he'll die, take old Donegal, who spent his life digging a hole through space, and now lies dying at home.

Walter M. Miller Jr.'s 1954 story (by the author of 'A Canticle for Leibowitz') is a tender, deeply moving tale of an old spaceman facing the end as the rockets thunder overhead. Beautiful, elegiac golden-age SF. Read it for one of the great humane stories of the era, about a life spent reaching for space.

In its time

Published in 1954, during the 1950s, post-war optimism meets cold war anxiety.

Reading it

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

Illustrated by

Ernest Schroeder