Roger D. Aycock 22 min read

Naked, weaponless, and numb with terror, Farrell wakes lost in the honeycombed dark beneath an alien Hymenop dome, far underground, cut off from his shipmates waiting above.

Roger D. Aycock's (Roger Dee's) 1952 story is a tense first-contact space opera. Sharp, gripping golden-age SF. Read it for a suspenseful tale of a survey man trapped in the depths of an insect-alien hive, where a strange psychological weapon forces people to bottle up their troubles, in a well-turned golden-age piece of claustrophobic dread and clever ideas.

In its time

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

Reading it

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

Illustrated by

Ed Emshwiller