Hal K. Wells 33 min read

On a New York subway platform, a rolling thunder of infra-bass seizes Robert Blake and Helen Lawton, the prelude to their being swept across space to the alien world of Xollar and the power of Zehru.

Hal K. Wells's 1932 story is a rousing first-contact space opera. Vivid, driven golden-age pulp. Read it for a colorful pulp yarn where an ordinary couple is snatched from Earth to a strange planet and its menacing alien intelligence, in the fast-moving, wonder-and-peril style of the classic scientifiction magazines of the early pulp era.

In its time

Published in 1932, during the 1930s, space opera soars.

Reading it

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