Jerome Bixby 12 min read

Keeping his little beetle-car between himself and the Martian water temple, big Hale slips through moonlit dunes to a clot of armed men, strange, he thinks, to fear getting shot by Randy.

Jerome Bixby's 1951 story is a rousing space-opera adventure. Vivid, atmospheric golden-age pulp. Read it for a colorful pulp yarn of intrigue, betrayal, and gunplay under the moons of Mars, rich with the exotic flavor of the red planet's deserts and temples, in the fast-moving, vivid style of the classic space-adventure magazines.

In its time

Published in 1951, during the 1950s, post-war optimism meets cold war anxiety.

Reading it

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