Robert Silverberg 21 min read

They warn you when you join the Exploratory Wing: out there on alien worlds, you take your life in your hands with every landing. Which is how one man came to crouch on Pollux V, staring at a monster.

Robert Silverberg's 1957 story is a taut horror-tinged space opera of an expedition in peril. Sharp, atmospheric golden-age SF. Read it for early Silverberg, a gripping tale of explorers on a hostile world, and the creeping dread that closes in on six frightened men.

In its time

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

Reading it

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