Alvin Heiner 10 min read

Fever-eyed Joe Spain can't stop telling anyone who'll listen that he's going to get aboard that ship to the Moon, while the lunchroom crowd laughs and asks what the Moon's got that Earth hasn't.

Alvin Heiner's 1958 story is a taut hard-SF space-opera tale. Sharp, driven golden-age SF. Read it for a tense story of a man consumed by a single obsession, to stow away on the first Moon rocket, and what his desperate determination leads to, in a lean, character-driven yarn of the early space age.

In its time

Published in 1958, during the 1950s, post-war optimism meets cold war anxiety.

Reading it

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