Morris Hershman 6 min read

No man enjoys sitting down to dinner across from a full-sized 3-D picture of his wife's first husband arriving on Venus, but Henry Weller's famous, adored predecessor won't come off the wall.

Morris Hershman's 1959 story is a wry social-SF space opera of jealousy and a legendary dead spaceman. Clever, funny golden-age SF. Read it for a genial domestic comedy where an ordinary factory foreman lives in the shadow of his wife's celebrated first husband, and the spacemen who supposedly never die.

In its time

Published in 1959, during the 1950s, post-war optimism meets cold war anxiety.

Reading it

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