Harry Bates 45 min read

A sleepy lookout stares at the scope-screen of a submarine gliding beneath the polar ice, ghostly fish, shafts of pale light through the floes, until something breaks the deep-sea monotony.

Harry Bates's 1932 story is a vivid, imaginative hard-SF adventure of the frozen deep. Atmospheric, inventive golden-age pulp. Read it for an early tale by the founding editor of Astounding, an evocative undersea adventure where the Arctic ice holds a wonder no one expected.

In its time

Published in 1932, during the 1930s, space opera soars.

Reading it

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