Randall Garrett 18 min read

Alfred Pendray pushes himself along the pastel-green corridor of the wrecked battleship Shane by flashlight, injured and adrift, a thousand light-years from home in a blasted hulk.

Randall Garrett's 1960 story is a taut social-SF space opera of survival and character. Sharp, thoughtful golden-age SF. Read it for a story where a stranded man in a derelict warship must reckon with hard choices, and the measure of a man proves to be the ability to tell the necessary from the desirable, and act.

In its time

Published in 1960, during the 1960s, new wave revolutionizes the genre.

Reading it

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