Frank Belknap Long 18 min read

Around a campfire in the Rockies, the well-traveled Charley Grimes, his face gaunt as a jungle mask, spins a tale of the dark side of the Moon that becomes something far stranger than a yarn.

Frank Belknap Long's 1948 story is a rousing space-opera and time-travel adventure. Vivid, atmospheric golden-age SF. Read it for a colorful frame-tale of interplanetary adventure and a temporal snare, told by a larger-than-life spacefaring raconteur, in a well-turned golden-age piece that mixes tall-tale charm with genuine science-fictional wonder.

In its time

Published in 1948, during the 1940s, the golden age begins.

Reading it

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

Illustrated by

Earl Mayan