R. R. Winterbotham 22 min read

Every great man owes his success to luck, the narrator insists, and neither a senator's brilliance nor his own youthful innocence could keep the two of them from being spacewrecked on a lonely world.

R. R. Winterbotham's 1955 story is a wry social-SF and space-opera tale of castaways and a not-quite-empty planet. Clever, genial golden-age SF. Read it for a story where a mismatched pair, stranded on a 'problem planet,' find it far less deserted than they'd thought.

In its time

Published in 1955, during the 1950s, post-war optimism meets cold war anxiety.

Reading it

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

Illustrated by

W. E. Terry