Frederik Pohl 19 min read

The nameless bar across the river in Hoboken has a color TV and a lousy jukebox, and the narrator kind of likes it, though he's not supposed to be there at all, and can't even remember getting there.

Frederik Pohl's 1958 story is a sharp, dark social-SF space opera of the psychological toll of spaceflight. Clever, unsettling golden-age SF. Read it for a story where the men who conquered space return unable to bear the sight of one another, and the hatred bred in the deep places of the void follows them home.

In its time

Published in 1958, during the 1950s, post-war optimism meets cold war anxiety.

Reading it

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

Illustrated by

Dick Francis