Clyde Brown 34 min read

To keep the record straight: Orville Close was first man on the Moon, Harold Ferguson second, and they never talk about it. It began the October morning the piece ran in the Parkville News.

Clyde Brown's 1958 story mines wry small-town comedy from a backyard rocket and the neighbors who think its builder has cracked. Funny, humane golden-age SF. Read it for a genial tale about two amateurs, a homemade Moon-shot, and the town that refuses to believe them.

In its time

Published in 1958, during the 1950s, post-war optimism meets cold war anxiety.

Reading it

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

Illustrated by

Wallace Wood