Kris Neville 35 min read

When the Russians schedule an underground blast, four American astronauts sit in their space suits outside the lunar dome, sharing the Moon with a rival crew, and barely able to talk to them.

Kris Neville's 1962 story is a wry, sharp first-contact and military-SF tale of the space race. Clever, timely golden-age SF. Read it for a pointed Cold War satire set on the Moon, where two superpower crews warily coexist amid comic communication failures, in a story that finds both humor and unease in the race for the heavens.

In its time

Published in 1962, during the 1960s, new wave revolutionizes the genre.

Reading it

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

Illustrated by

Burns