George O. Smith 9 min read

Holt isn't interested in mere glory, he's on his way to the Moon, but only because that's where he'll find the road to all the money he could ever spend. Holt has it all planned.

George O. Smith's 1953 story is a brisk hard-SF space opera of ambition and the space frontier. Sharp, engaging golden-age SF. Read it for a story where a coldly calculating man rides the first rush to the Moon chasing a fortune, and discovers that luck in space has a logic of its own.

In its time

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

Reading it

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

Illustrated by

Alex Ebel