Richard Rein Smith 15 min read

Earth is enveloped in atomic fire and the ship is a prize of war, and as the charred, dead planet dwindles in the screen, a carpenter who survived by luck grasps that everything is gone.

Richard Rein Smith's 1959 story is a taut post-apocalyptic first-contact and space-opera tale of the last survivors. Sharp, gripping golden-age SF. Read it for a story where the destruction of Earth forces a desperate reckoning, and disaster may make an unlikely victory necessary.

In its time

Published in 1959, during the 1950s, post-war optimism meets cold war anxiety.

Reading it

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