James McKimmey 43 min read

High above the Venusian jungle rests a temple where hooded, green-faced priests circle a silver orb, their webbed fingers weaving, their minds searching out across the vastness of the planet.

James McKimmey's 1953 story is an atmospheric first-contact space opera. Vivid, evocative golden-age SF. Read it for a moody, richly imagined tale of Venusian temple-priests and their strange psychic rites, and the earthmen who become entangled in them, in a well-turned golden-age piece heavy with the exotic atmosphere of a cloud-wrapped alien world.

In its time

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

Reading it

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

Illustrated by

Kelly Freas