Manly Wade Wellman 43 min read

'I wish you joy of your new home,' the Martian skipper purrs, braced upright on his tentacles, as he maroons the glowering Fitzhugh Parr on a small, mist-wrapped asteroid of green vegetation.

Manly Wade Wellman's 1941 story is a colorful colonization and space-opera adventure with a sting. Vivid, ironic golden-age pulp. Read it for a rousing tale where a man dumped as punishment on a strange little world discovers the devil's asteroid holds more, and worse, than a simple exile.

In its time

Published in 1941, during the 1940s, the golden age begins.

Reading it

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