Richard Wilson 36 min read

As a drug, uru was a junkie's dream; as a planet, Uru was paradise, but combined, the two became a living hell, and The Man waits in a cafeteria on West End Avenue.

Richard Wilson's 1956 story is a hard-edged colonization and social-SF tale of addiction. Sharp, gritty golden-age SF. Read it for an unusually noir-flavored story, steeped in the language of the drug world, where a wondrous alien planet and its irresistible drug prove a paradise no one can survive.

In its time

Published in 1956, during the 1950s, post-war optimism meets cold war anxiety.

Reading it

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

Illustrated by

Robert Engle