Ray Bradbury 19 min read

Another dead man comes aboard the Constellation, and Sam Burnett stands frozen in his surgical gown, a red haze over his mind, amid the cold tables and numbered shelves of the war dead.

Ray Bradbury's 1944 story is a grim, atmospheric military space opera of grief and dread among the collected corpses of a war in space. Vivid, unsettling early Bradbury. Read it for a haunting tale of a man who gathers the dead of the void, and the toll it takes on the living.

In its time

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

Reading it

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

Illustrated by

Joseph Doolin