Eighteen men and two women in the closed world of a space ship for five months can only spell tension and trouble-but in this case, the atmosphere was literally poisoned.
Lester del Rey (1915-1993) was an American science fiction writer and editor whose career spanned the formative decades of the genre. Active in pulp magazines during the 1930s and 1940s and later influential as an editor, del Rey helped shape the tone and direction of mid-twentieth-century science fiction. His fiction often combined scientific curiosity with humour and social observation, contributing to the evolution of speculative literature during the Golden Age.
