Murray Leinster 39 min read

On August 19, 2037, the UN fifty years old, televisors still monochrome, observatories track specks in space they believe are Martian ships, which other astronomers cannot find at all.

Murray Leinster's 1933 story is a vivid future-war and first-contact tale, wonderfully rich in imagined period detail. Sharp, inventive golden-age SF. Read it for a story that grounds an alien invasion in a fully realized future world, from a master world-builder.

In its time

Published in 1933, during the 1930s, space opera soars.

Reading it

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