George O. Smith 44 min read

John McBride stands on the roof garden of Satan's Hotel, in the city of Hell on Pluto, a livable world man wrenched from the coldest, most forbidding planet in the system for its uranium.

George O. Smith's 1944 story sets a hard-SF space opera on a vividly imagined, hellishly named Pluto. Colorful, inventive golden-age SF. Read it for a story steeped in the atmosphere of a mining colony on the system's outermost world, where a man's mind dwells far from Hell.

In its time

Published in 1944, during the 1940s, the golden age begins.

Reading it

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

Illustrated by

Paul Orban