Jesse F. Bone 34 min read

Arthur Lanceford slaps futilely at the sith, an outsized eight-legged parody of a mosquito, buzzing hungrily around his head on the sticky, flypaper mud of rain-soaked Niobe.

Jesse F. Bone's 1957 story is a colorful colonization and first-contact tale of survival on a hostile world. Vivid, engaging golden-age SF. Read it for a rousing planetary-survival yarn where a man alone against a viciously alive world must prove he's the survival type, with the fate of humanity's foothold riding on him.

In its time

Published in 1957, during the 1950s, post-war optimism meets cold war anxiety.

Reading it

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

Illustrated by

Fred Kirberger