Ross Rocklynne 30 min read

Into the World State's Master Conclave strides Olduk, the twelve-foot Martian ambassador, the herald of a menace that will confront a complacent Earth with the terrifying Tantalus death.

Ross Rocklynne's 1940 story is a rousing hard-SF and post-apocalyptic tale. Vivid, driven golden-age pulp. Read it for a colorful early Rocklynne yarn of interplanetary crisis and a strange, deadly threat to humankind, where science and nerve must answer an ultimatum from the stars, in the grand pulp catastrophe tradition.

In its time

Published in 1940, during the 1940s, the golden age begins.

Reading it

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

Illustrated by

Gene Fawcette