Charles E. Fritch 16 min read

It doesn't terrify Cantrell to be up so high and so fast, higher than any human before him, for tomorrow he'll go higher still, so high and so fast he will not come down again.

Charles E. Fritch's 1955 story is a taut, atmospheric hard-SF space opera of a pioneer's final flight. Sharp, evocative golden-age SF. Read it for a tense, interior story of a man facing the ultimate leap into the void, wrestling with the fear of the infinite emptiness that waits beyond the sky.

In its time

Published in 1955, during the 1950s, post-war optimism meets cold war anxiety.

Reading it

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

Illustrated by

Leo Summers