Bryce Walton 20 min read

Space-wrecked and lost in endless blackness, desperate men cling to old Dunbar's promise of a paradise beyond the sun with the red rim, though every star in this void seems ringed with beckoning red.

Bryce Walton's 1952 story is a haunting, poetic social-SF space opera. Evocative, moving, superbly told. Read it for a much-anthologized golden-age gem, castaways in the void following an old man's uncertain faith toward a hoped-for paradise, in a beautiful, melancholy meditation on hope, belief, and the human need for a destination.

In its time

Published in 1952, during the 1950s, post-war optimism meets cold war anxiety.

Reading it

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