Stanley Mullen 1 hr 2 min read

In Venusport on payday-night, it's hard to say where the town leaves off and the pink elephants begin, and Spud Newlin is testing the rumor that a man can get rich overnight tending bar, if he lasts.

Stanley Mullen's 1952 story is a colorful, rowdy social-SF space opera of a frontier boomtown. Vivid, wry golden-age pulp. Read it for a boisterous tale of a hard-luck bartender on a wide-open Venus, where survival behind the bar is its own kind of adventure.

In its time

Published in 1952, during the 1950s, post-war optimism meets cold war anxiety.

Reading it

1 hr 2 min read (a novelette, room for a turn or two).