Ray Cummings 1 hr 16 min read

Fishing for tarpon off a Florida bayou one blood-red sunset in 1948, the narrator feels a vague uneasiness, the prelude to an astounding adventure among the war-nymphs of Venus.

Ray Cummings's 1941 story is a rousing space-opera adventure. Vivid, driven golden-age pulp. Read it for a colorful pulp yarn from a genre pioneer, where an ordinary man is swept from a quiet Gulf evening into interplanetary peril and romance among the warrior-women of a cloud-wrapped Venus, in the breathless Cummings style.

In its time

Published in 1941, during the 1940s, the golden age begins.

Reading it

1 hr 16 min read (a novella, a full arc in one sitting or two).

Illustrated by

Frank R. Paul