Irving W. Lande 19 min read

'Got a bogey at three o'clock high, range about six hundred miles,' Johnson reports, voice thin with tension, and Captain Paul Coulter of Space Fighter 308 looks up into the starry black.

Irving W. Lande's 1958 story is a taut hard-SF space opera of a dogfight in the void, built on an ingenious ancient weapon. Sharp, clever golden-age SF. Read it for a gripping space-combat tale where the humble slingshot, unused in the last war, proves its worth in the next.

In its time

Published in 1958, during the 1950s, post-war optimism meets cold war anxiety.

Reading it

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

Illustrated by

Ed Emshwiller