Roy Paetzke 7 min read

Jimmy Lorre feels the Earth spin away beneath him on his first true flight into space, a frontier no ship has crossed since the first met a horrible end in the Heaviside Layer.

Roy Paetzke's 1941 story sends a pioneering cruiser to breach the barrier around Earth, building a military space opera of exploration and war. Atmospheric, imaginative golden-age pulp. Read it for a tale of humanity's first push past the sky, and the line drawn to defend a world.

In its time

Published in 1941, during the 1940s, the golden age begins.

Reading it

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