Originally published in Space Science Fiction, Volume 1, Number 4

With passages such as ‘an endless sea of diamond-pierced blackness’ interspersed with commonplace prose, Damon Knight’s tale of Algernon James Weaver’s journey to a far planet echoes many an author’s perspective from the ‘Golden Age’ of science-fiction. Knight wrote at a time when the prospect of discovering alien planets—in an age when mankind still believed it could get to the moon and figure out how to survive there—was as yet darkly tinged with the recent colonial experience which had not gone well for either indigenous or imperial nations.