E. Hoffmann Price 48 min read

In the perfumed artificial twilight of the Domes of Venus, lovely Linda tempts him to abandon his plan, to sail for savage Earth and seize the enormous ruby called the Fire of Skanderbek.

E. Hoffmann Price's 1951 story inverts the frontier, making a decadent Venus home and a ruined Earth the wild unknown. Lush, atmospheric colonization-and-post-apocalypse SF. Read it for an exotic tale of a Venusian sent among the 'savage' Terrestrians in search of a fabled jewel.

In its time

Published in 1951, during the 1950s, post-war optimism meets cold war anxiety.

Reading it

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

Illustrated by

Herman B. Vestal