Manly Wade Wellman 20 min read

Helmets fogging and glove-joints stiffening in the incredible cold, two survivors of a wrecked scout rocket build a sled from its girders, to cross half of frozen Pluto on foot.

Manly Wade Wellman's 1958 story is a gripping hard-SF space opera of endurance on the solar system's most brutal world. Vivid, harrowing golden-age SF. Read it for a tense survival tale, dragging its heroes across the crags and frozen air of Pluto against impossible odds.

In its time

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

Reading it

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

Illustrated by

Ed Emshwiller