Edmond Hamilton 51 min read

Dead ahead through the pilot-room's transparent wall blazes Canopus, a titanic white sun that dwarfs and dims all the jeweled stars around it, as the ship drives on toward the heart of a nebula.

Edmond Hamilton's 1929 story is a grand Interstellar Patrol space opera. Vast, driven, hugely influential. Read it for classic cosmic-scale Hamilton, a galaxy-spanning patrol confronting menace on a titanic stage of blazing suns and swirling nebulae, in the sweeping super-science style that made his Interstellar Patrol the template for all later space opera.

In its time

Published in 1929, during the 1920s, the pulp era proper.

Reading it

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

Illustrated by

Hugh Rankin