Robert Moore Williams 45 min read

Alone on frozen Pluto, tending a lonely observatory where a 20-inch scope beats Earth's 200-inch, Craig Randall develops his plates in the cold and dark, and is not, perhaps, alone.

Robert Moore Williams's 1953 story is an atmospheric first-contact space opera. Eerie, evocative golden-age SF. Read it for a moody story of isolation at the frozen edge of the solar system, where a lone astronomer confronts a strange presence, in a well-turned golden-age piece that finds creeping unease in the silence and cold of the outermost dark.

In its time

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

Reading it

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

Illustrated by

Ed Emshwiller