Jack Sharkey 8 min read

They awoke after ages of hiding, to emerge into a world richer than they had dared dream, Rik shivering awake on a cold slab, the vault swirling in milky light around him.

Jack Sharkey's 1964 story is a tense first-contact and horror tale of sleepers roused. Sharp, ominous golden-age SF. Read it for a story where beings long sealed away wake at last into a world ripe for the taking, and the reader slowly grasps what, exactly, has just opened its eyes.

In its time

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

Reading it

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