Vern Fearing 13 min read

Obese five-foot Bradley Broadshoulders, proud in the green tunic of the Galaxy Patrol and a tidy crop of Venusian fungus, stands grim-lipped before his Commander, in a very unserious space yarn.

Vern Fearing's 1953 story is a broad, cheerful space-opera comedy. Silly, fun golden-age SF. Read it for a genial send-up of pulp space adventure, a bumbling anti-heroic spaceman, the sloths of the title, and a tongue-firmly-in-cheek romp meant purely to amuse in a grim atomic age.

In its time

Published in 1953, during the 1950s, post-war optimism meets cold war anxiety.

Reading it

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

Illustrated by

Henry Sharp