Leigh Brackett 48 min read

Bucky Shannon leans across the table and jabs his partner in the chest: 'We are broke. Finished. Washed up. Destitute', Shannon's Imperial Circus plastered with attachments.

Leigh Brackett's 1943 story is a colorful, rollicking space-opera adventure. Vivid, atmospheric, superbly told. Read it for classic Brackett, a broke interplanetary circus, a monstrous star-beast, and a rousing adventure across a lush and dangerous Venus, from a queen of pulp SF.

In its time

Published in 1943, during the 1940s, the golden age begins.

Reading it

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

Illustrated by

Robert J. Leydenfrost