Boyd Ellanby 11 min read

Kotha's bar is deserted but for old Dworken, who's waited a week at six thousand credits a day, a tail-waving, green-eyed Venusian with money that never seems to worry him.

Boyd Ellanby's 1953 story is a colorful, characterful social-SF space opera set in a spaceport bar. Warm, wry golden-age SF. Read it for a genial tale of an interplanetary crossroads, a mysterious wealthy alien, and the show-business scheme that unfolds over drinks on Luna.

In its time

Published in 1953, during the 1950s, post-war optimism meets cold war anxiety.

Reading it

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

Illustrated by

Mel Hunter