Landell Bartlett 43 min read

Surrounded by scores of motionless, beady-eyed creatures in a moonlit hall, the narrator faces their Field General and his interpreter Oomlag, a captive at the mercy of the vanguard of Venus.

Landell Bartlett's 1928 story is a rousing first-contact space opera. Vivid, imaginative golden-age pulp. Read it for a colorful early scientifiction yarn of an Earthman among sinister Venusians, framed as a strange first-hand account, in the wonder-struck, adventure-packed style of the earliest Gernsback-era pulp magazines.

In its time

Published in 1928, during the 1920s, the pulp era proper.

Reading it

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

Illustrated by

R. E. Lawlor