Nelson S. Bond 41 min read

In the toughest dive on Mars, a spaceman watches an impossibly drunk stranger, and smells a setup.

Nelson Bond drops us into Xuerl's Cosmobar, a wonderfully seedy spaceport bar where you can get a weapon or a wench, a bottle or a battle, at an instant's notice. Chip Warren clocks a bleary Earthman surrounded by an ill-assorted, evil-looking crew, and the trap all but announces itself. Pure 1941 pulp pleasure: crackling slang, a vividly imagined Martian barman, and the swaggering interplanetary saloon that a hundred later stories would borrow. Read it for golden-age space opera at its most atmospheric and fun, before the clichés were clichés.

In its time

Published in 1941, during the 1940s, the golden age begins.

Reading it

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

Illustrated by

Don Lynch