R. R. Winterbotham 16 min read

A creeping red glow infects one quadrant of Commander Andrews's wheel-shaped ship, and three men flee before it, death breathing down the neck of at least one of them.

R. R. Winterbotham's 1954 story is a tense post-apocalyptic space opera. Sharp, gripping golden-age SF. Read it for a taut survival tale aboard a doomed spaceship, where a spreading, lethal menace forces three very different men into a desperate flight, in a fast-moving golden-age piece of dread, tension, and hard choices in the void.

In its time

Published in 1954, during the 1950s, post-war optimism meets cold war anxiety.

Reading it

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

Illustrated by

W. E. Terry