Norman Spinrad 25 min read

Interplanetary flight perfected, the Sol system colonized, Man turned to the stars, and ran into a stone wall, as scientists concluded faster-than-light travel was flatly impossible, and gave up.

Norman Spinrad's 1964 story is a sharp psi-powers and space-opera tale of a government's desperate answer to a closed frontier. Clever, driven golden-age SF (early Spinrad). Read it for a story where a boxed-in humanity, facing racial claustrophobia, gambles on a strange inner route to the stars when the outer one is barred.

In its time

Published in 1964, during the 1960s, new wave revolutionizes the genre.

Reading it

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

Illustrated by

Leo Summers