Richard S. Shaver 22 min read

Out of fuel and supplies, Steve Donay must land on a queer world of rising smoke, and finds beneath the coils a beautiful landscape too regular to be wild: a planted, controlled paradise.

Richard S. Shaver's 1953 story is a vivid AI-and-colonization tale of a machine-tended world. Colorful, imaginative golden-age SF. Read it for a story where a desperate landing on a smoke-wreathed planet reveals an engineered paradise, and the secret behind it.

In its time

Published in 1953, during the 1950s, post-war optimism meets cold war anxiety.

Reading it

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