Charles Beaumont 31 min read

Impossible, the captain says, but the crewman insists he sees a city through the screen, out here where no city could possibly be.

Charles Beaumont's 1953 story, by the celebrated Twilight Zone writer, opens on an impossible sighting and builds a quietly eerie first-contact space-opera tale. Elegant, haunting, beautifully written. Read it for a melancholy little masterpiece from a master of the strange and the lyrical.

In its time

Published in 1953, during the 1950s, post-war optimism meets cold war anxiety.

Reading it

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