Robert F. Young 9 min read

That night her son was the first star, and she stood motionless in the April garden, one hand pressed to her heart, watching him rise above the fields where he had played as a boy.

Robert F. Young's 1959 story is a lyrical, deeply moving social-SF space opera of a mother and her astronaut son. Tender, poetic golden-age SF. Read it for a poignant story of the first man in orbit seen through his mother's eyes, as she watches her boy ride his celestial carousel round and round the world.

In its time

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

Reading it

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