Tom Godwin 13 min read

Alone in an observation bubble far beyond the galaxy's rim, he wonders what terror drove the men before him, one to suicide, one to madness, with nothing outside but empty space.

Tom Godwin's 1959 story is a taut, atmospheric psi-powers space opera of isolation. Sharp, chilling golden-age SF. Read it for a gripping story where a lone watcher in the ultimate emptiness confronts the same nameless dread that destroyed his predecessors, and the nothing equation that may hold the answer.

In its time

Published in 1959, during the 1950s, post-war optimism meets cold war anxiety.

Reading it

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