Harold Calin 20 min read

To rocket scientist Bannister, the manned space program has flipped inside-out, he no longer tests men's reactions to space probes, but tests probes, with man just a necessary evil to contend with.

Harold Calin's 1961 story is a thoughtful hard-SF space opera. Sharp, pointed golden-age SF. Read it for a story that questions the place of the human being in an age of machines and instruments, where an engineer's cold calculus collides with the stubborn, irreplaceable value of a man, in a well-turned golden-age piece about what need there is of man.

In its time

Published in 1961, during the 1960s, new wave revolutionizes the genre.

Reading it

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

Illustrated by

Leo Summers