Basil Wells 21 min read

'The outlaw ships are attacking, cut the searchlights!' Old Garmon Nash barks, as the rocket flyer is trapped deep in the thirty-seventh of the linked caverns beneath the waterless wastes of Mars.

Basil Wells's 1944 story is a vivid colonization and lost-world adventure set in the caves of Mars. Vivid, driven golden-age pulp. Read it for a rousing subterranean-Mars yarn, where explorers lured into an underground hideout must fight their way free among the strange peoples of the linked cavern worlds.

In its time

Published in 1944, during the 1940s, the golden age begins.

Reading it

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

Illustrated by

Ellis Wellington Potter