Stephen Marlowe 2 hr 40 min read

When the draft comes, Temple must leave Earth and the girl he loves, knowing the hardest part is that he can never return, in a future where military service is a one-way voyage.

Stephen Marlowe's (Milton Lesser's) 1953 story is a sharp social-SF space opera. Poignant, gripping golden-age SF. Read it for a tense, affecting story of a future draft that sends men on a permanent, mysterious exile among the stars, and one man's struggle against a fate that means losing everything he loves, in a well-turned golden-age piece.

In its time

Published in 1953, during the 1950s, post-war optimism meets cold war anxiety.

Reading it

2 hr 40 min read (a novel-length work, settle in).

Illustrated by

Paul Calle