Jack Egan 14 min read

Harvey Crane wakes flat on his back beneath a flat pink half-sphere of sky, bothered by its color, then crawls to the Edge of the World, peers over, and sees rosiness swirling in the void below.

Jack Egan's 1962 story is a wry, surreal fantasy and space-opera tale. Clever, strange golden-age SF. Read it for a disorienting story of a man waking on a bizarre, literally edged world, unfolding its strangeness with dry humor toward a revelation, in a well-turned golden-age piece that finds both comedy and wonder at the very edge of things.

In its time

Published in 1962, during the 1960s, new wave revolutionizes the genre.

Reading it

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

Illustrated by

Virgil Finlay