Robert Wicks 18 min read

Brandon looks at the Milky Way like a man staring into a fire, thinking of home, a lone scout on the red deserts of Sirius Three, who reports back on the far reaches of space.

Robert Wicks's 1958 story is a sharp hard-SF and social-SF tale with an unsettling twist. Clever, gripping golden-age SF. Read it for a story where a space explorer, mapping the distant frontier, makes the disquieting discovery that the far reaches of space somehow know more about events back home than he does.

In its time

Published in 1958, during the 1950s, post-war optimism meets cold war anxiety.

Reading it

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