Lester Del Rey 15 min read

The starship Pandora creaks and groans as her pads settle in the mucky surface of an ugly world two hundred light-years from Earth, restless, it seems, to end her fool's errand here.

Lester del Rey's 1961 story is a taut colonization and first-contact tale of a desperate errand on a hostile planet. Sharp, atmospheric golden-age SF. Read it for a moody story where a weary captain and his crew, sent to seed a new world for Earth's waiting hordes, find something already waiting for them.

In its time

Published in 1961, during the 1960s, new wave revolutionizes the genre.

Reading it

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