Hayden Howard 24 min read

The Captain's runaway feet splat over his crewman's bootprints in a race of death he cannot stop, the thing riding his back, driving him endlessly on across a burning, dust-ghost-haunted world.

Hayden Howard's 1952 story blends space opera with visceral horror as an unstoppable menace hunts men across an alien planet. Kinetic, feverish golden-age SF. Read it for a nightmarish tale of a driven man, a lethal thing, and a pursuit he is powerless to end.

In its time

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

Reading it

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