Robert Abernathy 19 min read

Westover gets a shock when he stumbles onto the monster in the flooded dark, for all that he knew one had come this way, waist-deep in water, following high ground on a world in ruin.

Robert Abernathy's 1950 story is a somber post-apocalyptic space opera of a devastated Earth. Atmospheric, evocative golden-age SF. Read it for a moody story where a lone survivor picks his way through a drowning, ruined world and meets a monster tied to the strange exodus that is humanity's last hope.

In its time

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

Reading it

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

Illustrated by

Al McWilliams