Lyn Venable 11 min read

What thrill is there in going out among the stars if coming back means bitter loneliness? Four aging men pass the time with checkers and magazines, each staring past the game into some private ache.

Lyn Venable's 1952 story is a quiet, melancholy space opera about the human cost of spaceflight. Tender, affecting golden-age SF. Read it for a poignant story about starfarers for whom the hardest part of the voyage is what waits, or doesn't, back home.

In its time

Published in 1952, during the 1950s, post-war optimism meets cold war anxiety.

Reading it

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

Illustrated by

Ed Emshwiller