Eando Binder 11 min read

The flight was listed at GHQ as Project Songbird, and its pilot was hand-picked Captain Dan Barstow, first man to cross the sea of air and sight open, unlimited space, a pioneer flight to infinity.

Eando Binder's 1957 story is a brisk hard-SF space opera of a record-breaking pioneer spaceflight. Fast, wholesome golden-age SF. Read it for a rousing early-space-age adventure, where the first man into open space meets an emergency that will make or unmake his name.

In its time

Published in 1957, during the 1950s, post-war optimism meets cold war anxiety.

Reading it

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