Hayden Howard 10 min read

As a pretty rockette bends to unbuckle his safticorsette, the newly appointed Commissioner-for-Economics-for-Mars peeks, then sneaks his manicured fingers about her wrist.

Hayden Howard's 1952 story is a wry, comic social-SF space opera. Fun, satirical golden-age SF. Read it for a genial farce of a pompous, self-indulgent bureaucrat aboard a Mars-bound liner, whose wandering eye and the luminous blonde lead him into delightful trouble.

In its time

Published in 1952, during the 1950s, post-war optimism meets cold war anxiety.

Reading it

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

Illustrated by

Kelly Freas