John Berryman 58 min read

When America's communications satellites keep failing, engineer Mike must fight both a stubborn colleague and a baffling technical gremlin to save the whole orbital network from collapse.

John Berryman's 1963 novel is a solid, well-researched hard-SF and social-SF tale. Sharp, credible golden-age SF. Read it for a satisfying problem-and-politics story of the early satellite age, where engineering ingenuity and office intrigue combine as a lone technician races to diagnose and fix a crisis high above the Earth.

In its time

Published in 1963, during the 1960s, new wave revolutionizes the genre.

Reading it

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

Illustrated by

John Schoenherr