Walter M. Miller 17 min read

They all knew he was a spacer from the white goggle-marks on his sun-scorched face, so they tolerated him, even when he staggered drunk down the bus aisle, nine months since he'd last seen Earth.

Walter M. Miller's 1955 story is a poignant social-SF space opera about the cost of the spaceman's life. Sharp, humane golden-age SF. Read it for a moving story by the author of 'A Canticle for Leibowitz', a rootless space rover, unfit for Earth and family, torn between the void that ruins him and the home he can never keep.

In its time

Published in 1955, during the 1950s, post-war optimism meets cold war anxiety.

Reading it

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