C. L. Moore 4 min read

On a clovered hillside warm in the sun, Northwest Smith lies back and drinks in the fragrance of Earth he'd promised himself through how many lonely months and years on alien worlds.

C. L. Moore's 1957 story is a brief, lyrical, elegiac space-opera vignette of her famous outlaw hero. Poignant, beautifully written golden-age SF. Read it for a tender coda to the Northwest Smith saga, a quiet, aching moment of homecoming from one of SF's finest prose stylists.

In its time

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

Reading it

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