Richard Wilson 26 min read

Those couplets held, unless they lied, the reason why a world had died, and the skipper couldn't believe the secret of a lost civilization was doggerel verse.

Richard Wilson's 1957 story spins a wry post-apocalyptic space-opera mystery from cryptic alien poetry and a linguist's stubborn translation. Sharp, clever golden-age SF. Read it for an inventive tale where the epitaph of a dead world reads like a nursery rhyme.

In its time

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

Reading it

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

Illustrated by

Jack Gaughan