Edmond Hamilton 1 hr 30 min read

It isn't the dying itself, it's the waiting, the windowless room, the walk to the airlock, the impersonal faces of the men whose job it is. Then the room with a window, and Mars filling the sky.

Edmond Hamilton's 1956 story is a gripping social-SF space opera of execution and resurrection. Vivid, atmospheric golden-age SF. Read it for a story where the condemned are cast naked into space to die, and some, impossibly, come back, forming the strange brotherhood called the Legion of Lazarus.

In its time

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

Reading it

1 hr 30 min read (a novella, a full arc in one sitting or two).