Alfred Coppel 7 min read

The ship lies at a crazy angle on the pumice plain, rockets fused to slag, and in the utter silence Thurmon knows there can be no return, but fame is worth the last years of a blighted life.

Alfred Coppel's 1950 story is a taut, dark hard-SF space opera of ambition and its price. Sharp, gripping golden-age SF. Read it for a story of a man who schemed and sacrificed everything to be first on the Moon, and now, marooned and dying, reckons with the true cost of his immortality.

In its time

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

Reading it

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