E. E. Smith 57 min read

There's always the problem of surviving an experience any trained expert can handle, when there's been no first survivor to become the expert. Aboard the Procyon, the last warning sounds.

E.E. Smith's 1960 story (a Subspace/D'Alembert tale) is a rousing hard-SF space opera of disaster and improvisation. Sharp, engaging golden-age SF. Read it for classic Doc Smith competence under fire, as passengers and crew of a stricken starship must survive a catastrophe no one has ever lived through before.

In its time

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

Reading it

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

Illustrated by

H. R. Van Dongen