Erik Fennel 15 min read

Every day, people travel far to stand in silence before the statue at Southwestern Spaceport, a figure of noble idealism its sculptor built from telephoto photographs, having never met the man.

Erik Fennel's 1948 story is a sharp dystopian social-SF tale of a manufactured legend. Clever, pointed golden-age SF. Read it for a story that peels back the making of a hero, the gap between the idealized shrine and the truth of the man, and how a world's adulation is engineered.

In its time

Published in 1948, during the 1940s, the golden age begins.

Reading it

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

Illustrated by

Herman B. Vestal