Fritz Leiber 24 min read

With the First Interstellar War lost, young Grunfeld and twenty others must thread a desperate braking pass through Uranus's cold atmosphere or be flung out of the Solar System.

Fritz Leiber's 1962 story is a superb, vividly written military-SF space opera. Lyrical, gripping, unforgettable. Read it for one of Leiber's finest tales, a doomed crew's audacious plan to survive by grazing the atmosphere of a swollen, mad Uranus, told with dazzling prose and real suspense.

In its time

Published in 1962, during the 1960s, new wave revolutionizes the genre.

Reading it

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

Illustrated by

Mack