Fletcher Pratt 14 min read

The mighty ship looses a sheet of energy, but the Uranian vessel's beams meet a counter-energy screen, space warfare imagined by a renowned military historian who took the question seriously.

Fletcher Pratt's 1953 story is a thoughtful, well-reasoned military-SF space opera. Sharp, credible golden-age SF. Read it for a hard-headed vision of interplanetary combat from a noted naval and military historian, who brings real strategic thinking to the tactics, weapons, and ships of a future space war, in a well-turned golden-age piece guaranteed to surprise would-be spacemen.

In its time

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

Reading it

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