Alfred Coppel 16 min read

The river ran still and deep with the smell of late summer, only it wasn't the Russian River of his boyhood, but the Sacred Iss of Barsoom, and the man dreaming it was very far from home.

Alfred Coppel's 1956 story is a poignant psi-powers space opera about a spaceman's fragile mind. Sharp, moving golden-age SF (with a loving nod to Burroughs's Mars). Read it for a story where a lonely crewman's cherished daydreams of Barsoom become both his refuge and his peril in the deep and testing void.

In its time

Published in 1956, during the 1950s, post-war optimism meets cold war anxiety.

Reading it

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