Henry Slesar 9 min read

It's lonely out there in space, so lonely a man aches for a human face and voice, and something must be sent to him. On a windswept asteroid, a man begs others to feel what he feels.

Henry Slesar's 1957 story builds a poignant AI-and-space-opera tale around isolation and the need for company. Atmospheric, humane golden-age SF. Read it for a moving story about the crushing solitude of a lonely outpost, and the strange remedy devised to ease it.

In its time

Published in 1957, during the 1950s, post-war optimism meets cold war anxiety.

Reading it

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

Illustrated by

Paul Orban