Leigh Brackett 46 min read

Aboard a weed-grown hull adrift on Venus's Sea of Morning Opals, the bitter exile Matt Harker counts his sweat and his rage, one of thirty-eight hundred Earth refugees trapped, going no place.

Leigh Brackett's 1945 story is an atmospheric, muscular colonization adventure. Vivid, lyrical, superbly styled. Read it for classic Brackett Venus, a hard-bitten hero leading desperate exiles across a cloud-wrapped ocean world in search of a home, told with the tough romantic poetry that made her queen of planetary adventure.

In its time

Published in 1945, during the 1940s, the golden age begins.

Reading it

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