John Cory 5 min read

On his fifteenth orbit, an astronaut runs the routine checks, everything normal, every instrument perfect, and finds he isn't even surprised, or thinking about it at all.

John Cory's 1962 story builds quiet hard-SF dread from the psychology of a man alone in a flawless capsule circling the Earth. Sharp, unsettling golden-age SF. Read it for a taut story where the real danger of spaceflight turns out to be inside the pilot's own head.

In its time

Published in 1962, during the 1960s, new wave revolutionizes the genre.

Reading it

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