Dean Ing 23 min read

MacNamara knows the theory of fixing the gizmo cold, but the little matter of threading a wire through a too-small hole, in zero gravity, in a spacesuit, is another thing entirely.

Dean Ing's 1955 story is a sharp hard-SF space opera of practical engineering. Clever, gripping golden-age SF. Read it for a tense competence-under-pressure tale where survival hinges on a maddeningly delicate repair in the worst possible conditions, in a well-turned golden-age piece that finds real suspense in the nuts-and-bolts reality of working in space.

In its time

Published in 1955, during the 1950s, post-war optimism meets cold war anxiety.

Reading it

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