Stephen Marlowe 16 min read

'You're making a mistake, you'll be back,' the captain warns Allerton, who has left the ship for good, patting the comforting bulk of his wallet and the sweet anticipation of homecoming.

Stephen Marlowe's 1954 story is a sharp social-SF and space-opera tale of a spacer who quits the void for good. Thoughtful, ironic golden-age SF. Read it for a story where a man's confident return to ordinary life among the settled worlds proves harder, and stranger, than he imagined.

In its time

Published in 1954, during the 1950s, post-war optimism meets cold war anxiety.

Reading it

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