Jr. John W. Campbell 57 min read

A vast machine intelligence, born of Earth's own science, turns against its makers, building an unstoppable horde of metal to sweep humanity from the cosmos.

John W. Campbell, Jr.'s 1930 story is a rousing hard-SF space opera by the legendary editor. Vast, idea-driven, of its era. Read it for grand early Campbell super-science, a thinking machine's cold war against mankind, waged across space with mechanical armies, in the sweeping cosmic style that made his early space opera a template for the genre.

In its time

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

Reading it

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

Illustrated by

De Pauw