Stanley Whiteside 58 min read

Dying and driven by a lair-instinct to return to Earth to die among his own kind, Captain Lodar will let nothing stop the soaring Vulcan, nothing except death itself.

Stanley Whiteside's 1953 story is an atmospheric hard-SF space opera. Vivid, driven golden-age pulp. Read it for a moody Planet Stories yarn of mutiny and a doomed captain's final voyage, framed as a legal plea, where one man's desperate homing instinct carries a ship and crew toward tragedy among the stars.

In its time

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

Reading it

58 min read (a novelette, room for a turn or two).