Joseph Slotkin 32 min read

Relaxing over his second Plutonian Stinger in Charley's Venusian Retreat, the narrator is interrupted by a scared, sweating stranger bursting through the door, with a wild tale and a plea for help.

Joseph Slotkin's 1954 story is a breezy, comic space-opera adventure told in slangy bar-room patter. Fun, genial golden-age SF. Read it for a rollicking tall-tale of the spaceways, where a nervous stranger's story of the Queen of Space draws a hard-boiled barfly into an unlikely adventure.

In its time

Published in 1954, during the 1950s, post-war optimism meets cold war anxiety.

Reading it

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