Harlan Ellison 25 min read

Orbiting the doomed world of Diamore, Captain Shreve's crew face a planet about to explode, and inhabitants too proud and adolescent to accept the help that could save them.

Harlan Ellison's 1957 story is a sharp first-contact and social-SF tale. Clever, pointed golden-age SF. Read it for an early Ellison story about pride, immaturity, and the tragedy of a race too callow to ask for rescue, in a well-turned golden-age piece that finds a sting of human truth in an alien catastrophe.

In its time

Published in 1957, during the 1950s, post-war optimism meets cold war anxiety.

Reading it

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

Illustrated by

Kelly Freas