Margaret St. Clair 14 min read

The peculiar terror of deep space is hard to put in words, for out there, unlike any castaway on Earth's seas or deserts, a lost soul floats utterly cut off from the home world that gave it life.

Margaret St. Clair's 1952 story is an atmospheric, unsettling social-SF space opera. Evocative, eerie golden-age SF. Read it for a mood-drenched tale that captures the alien loneliness of the void, unfolding a strange story of isolation and menace far from Earth, in St. Clair's distinctive, quietly disturbing golden-age style.

In its time

Published in 1952, during the 1950s, post-war optimism meets cold war anxiety.

Reading it

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

Illustrated by

Al McWilliams