Manly Wade Wellman 39 min read

In the year 2675, a fighting ship climbs from the towering spires of St. Louis, capital of the Terrestrial League, into a war between Earth and Mars, and the menace of an invading asteroid.

Manly Wade Wellman's 1932 story is a rousing early space opera. Vivid, imaginative golden-age pulp. Read it for a colorful Gernsback-era adventure of interplanetary war and a world-threatening asteroid, from a writer who became a master of the weird, an energetic slice of the earliest pulp space opera, brimming with future cities and cosmic peril.

In its time

Published in 1932, during the 1930s, space opera soars.

Reading it

39 min read (a novelette, room for a turn or two).