Randall Garrett 13 min read

One thousand seventy-five miles above the wrinkled Earth, aboard Space Station One, Lieutenant Alice Britton clutches the sheets in pain, the first woman ever to give birth in orbit.

Randall Garrett's 1954 story is a warm, ingenious hard-SF and social-SF tale of an orbital emergency. Clever, human golden-age SF. Read it for a genial story where the first childbirth in space becomes a race against orbital mechanics, and ground control must solve an unprecedented problem in a hurry.

In its time

Published in 1954, during the 1950s, post-war optimism meets cold war anxiety.

Reading it

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