C. J. Wedlake 10 min read

A tiny one-man ship crawls across the blazing face of the sun, its sunward side glowing dull red, as inside, sweat-soaked Jim MacDonald stares at a thermometer reading over two hundred.

C. J. Wedlake's 1949 story is a taut hard-SF space opera of a pilot trapped in a lethal solar orbit. Sharp, tense golden-age SF. Read it for a gripping survival tale where a lone spaceman, roasting alive, must find a way out of a deadly plunge toward the sun.

In its time

Published in 1949, during the 1940s, the golden age begins.

Reading it

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