Robert Silverberg 16 min read

Consider the poor mailman of the future, to sleet and snow add sub-zero void, meteors, and planets that won't stay put. Busted from the Space Patrol to Postal Delivery, Preston growls: me, a postman!

Robert Silverberg's 1957 story is a genial, adventurous space opera of interplanetary mail-carrying. Fun, brisk golden-age SF. Read it for a rousing tale where a disgraced patrolman, reduced to delivering the mail across the solar system, finds real danger on his route.

In its time

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

Reading it

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