Richard S. Shaver 19 min read

From the misty center of a black-emerald pool rises a vast and beautiful head, its living hair rippling, a mermaid goddess vaulting to her throne-seat before tiers of watching human people.

Richard S. Shaver's 1953 story is a vivid, mythic space-opera adventure. Colorful, feverish golden-age pulp. Read it for a full-blooded Shaver fantasy of hidden worlds and dark divinities, where a serpent-tailed sea-goddess reigns over a strange underground realm, told with lush, hallucinatory intensity.

In its time

Published in 1953, during the 1950s, post-war optimism meets cold war anxiety.

Reading it

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