Harry Walton 25 min read

A taut steel cable snaps and screams over the stern of the Mermaid, trawling the Molo Ivrum, Venus's Deadly Sea, so named because it teems with life, most of it decidedly unpleasant.

Harry Walton's 1941 story is an atmospheric horror-tinged space opera of the deadly Venusian ocean. Vivid, tense golden-age pulp. Read it for a rousing tale of a fishing vessel on an alien sea, where a fouled net drags up something from the teeming deep that no crew was meant to face.

In its time

Published in 1941, during the 1940s, the golden age begins.

Reading it

25 min read (a novelette, room for a turn or two).

Illustrated by

Leo Morey