Stephen Marlowe 36 min read

The Triton stevedore foreman has loaded a thousand strange cargoes, mining gear, tavern innards, riot weapons, but never an all-girl symphony orchestra, bound for a world beyond Pluto.

Stephen Marlowe's 1958 story is a wry space-opera adventure. Vivid, colorful golden-age SF. Read it for a genial yarn that sets an unlikely cargo, an orchestra of women, aboard an over-age ship bound for the outer dark, in a fast-moving, good-humored golden-age piece full of frontier-spaceport color and offbeat charm.

In its time

Published in 1958, during the 1950s, post-war optimism meets cold war anxiety.

Reading it

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

Illustrated by

Irving H. Novick