Donald Colvin 18 min read

'I QUIT, YOU BALLOON BRAIN,' reads the spacegram from Jed Michaels to his boss, a big-time space promoter who can get the Horsehead Nebula in a flying mare, but finds pinning a planetoid tougher.

Donald Colvin's 1951 story is a genial, comic social-SF space opera told partly in memos. Fun, wry golden-age SF. Read it for a light workplace farce among the stars, where an exasperated interplanetary showman-promoter takes on his most impossible booking yet, with wrestling-match bravado.

In its time

Published in 1951, during the 1950s, post-war optimism meets cold war anxiety.

Reading it

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