Ray Bradbury 26 min read

Old and neglected in the shadows of Marsport, watching the supply ship TERRA amid hard faces and worried silence, an aged spacer talks to himself, nobody wants him, machines are better now.

Ray Bradbury's 1948 story is a poignant, atmospheric space opera about age, obsolescence, and worth. Lyrical, humane early Bradbury. Read it for a moving tale of a discarded old spaceman who may yet prove that a man can do what no machine can.

In its time

Published in 1948, during the 1940s, the golden age begins.

Reading it

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