Stanton A. Coblentz 30 min read

Face red with haste and blue eyes glittering, Dan Holcomb bursts into the lab and flings his hat across the room, waving a handsomely embossed letter promising twenty-five thousand dollars.

Stanton A. Coblentz's 1943 story is a lively hard-SF space opera with a satirical touch. Fun, inventive golden-age pulp. Read it for a genial story where a young inventor's sudden windfall sets in motion a scheme of cosmic scale, told with the wit and imagination of a veteran of early SF.

In its time

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

Reading it

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