Verne Athanas 22 min read

Jonathan Drake swims back to consciousness like a bubble through molasses, arms leaden on the shock-chair, croaking 'Doc? Doc?' into a silent room where only the control board purrs.

Verne Athanas's 1949 story is a colorful, comic first-contact space opera. Fun, inventive golden-age pulp. Read it for a genial pulp yarn where a groggily-waking spaceman confronts the madcap metalloids, mischievous metallic beings whose antics turn an expedition delightfully upside down.

In its time

Published in 1949, during the 1940s, the golden age begins.

Reading it

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