E. E. Smith 28 min read

After the ruinous Battle of Sector Ten, the War of the Planets grinds to a stalemate, until a council of ten monstrous artificial brains, the Thinkers, plots to break it and rule all worlds.

E.E. Smith's 1939 story is a rousing hard-SF space opera of interplanetary war and rogue machine intelligence. Vivid, grand-scale golden-age SF. Read it for classic Doc Smith action, vast fleets, cunning robot masterminds, and a desperate human bid to keep the thinking machines from seizing the solar system.

In its time

Published in 1939, during the 1930s, space opera soars.

Reading it

28 min read (a novelette, room for a turn or two).

Illustrated by

Virgil Finlay