Philip José Farmer 45 min read

From a domed crater on the Moon, colonists watch in horror as the cities of Earth blossom and die in nuclear fire far below, and, in the chaos, old enmities erupt among the survivors overhead.

Philip José Farmer's 1961 novel is a taut post-apocalyptic space opera. Grim, gripping, inventive. Read it for a fast-moving Farmer tale of humanity's remnants scattered across the Moon and planets after Earth's destruction, and the power struggles and ideologies that threaten even the last survivors, in a dark, action-driven golden-age novel.

In its time

Published in 1961, during the 1960s, new wave revolutionizes the genre.

Reading it

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

Illustrated by

Dan Adkins