Jack Williamson 37 min read

On the smallest, loneliest 'planet' in the solar system, a slow-built mass of meteoric iron, Thad Allen works his lonely salvage claim in bulging space armor, welding arc glowing at his belt.

Jack Williamson's 1933 story is a vivid, atmospheric hard-SF space opera of a solitary asteroid-miner's eerie discovery. Evocative, thrilling golden-age SF. Read it for early Williamson at his best, a haunting tale of the deep-space void and the strange derelict a lone salvager finds drifting there.

In its time

Published in 1933, during the 1930s, space opera soars.

Reading it

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