Richard Wilson 10 min read

Spaceborne when the Earth explodes, pilot Roy Vanjan survives with one other man, and his orders become clear and simple: strafe Noah's ark, killing every human aboard, but keep every animal alive.

Richard Wilson's 1956 story is a wry, provocative military-SF and time-travel tale. Clever, ironic golden-age SF. Read it for a sharp, mordant story that hurls a war pilot back to a biblical past with an impossible mission, in a darkly witty meditation on survival, scripture, and the end of the world.

In its time

Published in 1956, during the 1950s, post-war optimism meets cold war anxiety.

Reading it

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

Illustrated by

Robert Engle