Murray Leinster 34 min read

Suddenly the biggest thing in the universe was the very tiniest, and against a plague no one could see, all the might of a star-spanning civilization counted for nothing.

Murray Leinster's 1961 story opens on the vast confidence of an interstellar humanity, then turns that grandeur against a microscopic threat. Thoughtful, well-built hard-SF space opera from a master. Read it for a story where the fate of worlds turns on the smallest things of all.

In its time

Published in 1961, during the 1960s, new wave revolutionizes the genre.

Reading it

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

Illustrated by

Virgil Finlay