Stephen Marlowe 16 min read

Adam Slade crushes a guard's skull with a length of iron pipe and breaks free with a hostage, a condemned killer certain that no one has ever escaped the prison awaiting him.

Stephen Marlowe's 1956 story (as C. H. Thames) is a tense space-opera and time-travel tale of a doomed convict's desperate bid for freedom. Sharp, gripping golden-age SF. Read it for a story where a violent escape leads toward the most inescapable prison ever devised.

In its time

Published in 1956, during the 1950s, post-war optimism meets cold war anxiety.

Reading it

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

Illustrated by

Harold W. McCauley