Fletcher Pratt Laurence Manning 1 hr 17 min read

'Now passing Phobos...', a live broadcast from the most dangerous stretch of the voyage, the planetoid belt, where a single wandering little world could end the transmission, and the ship, at once.

Pratt and Manning's 1939 story frames its hard-SF space voyage as a running radio commentary from an outbound expedition. Vivid, immersive early space opera. Read it for a you-are-there journey to the edge of the solar system, narrated as it happens.

In its time

Published in 1939, during the 1930s, space opera soars.

Reading it

1 hr 17 min read (a novella, a full arc in one sitting or two).