Robert Sheckley 19 min read

Compared with a spaceship in distress, going to hell in a handbasket is roomy and slow, and the trusty old freighter Queen Dierdre has just decided to fail all at once.

Robert Sheckley's 1956 story spins a tense, wry crisis from a crippled ship and the AI that might save it. Sharp, funny, ingenious golden-age SF from a master of the form. Read it for a clever, suspenseful tale of engineers, a doomed freighter, and a very unusual solution.

In its time

Published in 1956, during the 1950s, post-war optimism meets cold war anxiety.

Reading it

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