Allen Kim Lang 18 min read

A terse message, a railhead, a Soviet name, an impossible velocity, the Moon, makes White Sands look trivial and turns a rocket engineer into a salesman, in a Cold War race for space.

Allen Kim Lang's 1957 story is a sharp hard-SF and space-opera tale. Clever, timely golden-age SF. Read it for a wry, well-researched story of the space race where the Soviets' startling lunar gambit forces an American engineer into an unexpected role, in a fast-moving golden-age piece with real rocketry and Cold War bite.

In its time

Published in 1957, during the 1950s, post-war optimism meets cold war anxiety.

Reading it

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

Illustrated by

John Schoenherr