Evan Hunter 7 min read

'It won't work, Dr. Saunders,' the big man says flatly of the blueprints on the table, but the thin, anxious inventor in gray tweeds insists, slapping the table, that it can be done.

Evan Hunter's 1951 story is a sharp hard-SF and social-SF tale of a scientist defying the skeptics. Sharp, well-observed golden-age SF. Read it for a story where a lone inventor's rejected dream of reaching the Moon runs up against the certainty of the experts, from a future bestselling novelist.

In its time

Published in 1951, during the 1950s, post-war optimism meets cold war anxiety.

Reading it

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