First Spaceman, The

The world is given twenty-four hours to surrender. A vast alien armada waits beyond the atmosphere, silent and confident that humanity will yield. Instead, Earth launches a single rocket. At the controls sits Rogers, a young pilot chosen to meet the invaders alone. The mission is simple to describe and nearly impossible to survive. One ship, one atomic warhead, and an enemy fleet numbering in the hundreds. If Rogers fails, the planet dies with him. Out in the silent black of space, the battle unfolds in ways no strategist on Earth could have predicted. Rogers finds himself improvising with shattered equipment, failing systems, and only minutes to solve problems no human has ever faced before. Each decision pushes him closer to either a spectacular victory or an empty grave drifting through orbit. But sometimes surviving the impossible is only the beginning of trouble. Back on Earth, celebrations erupt, monuments rise, and the story of the heroic spaceman spreads across the planet. There is only one complication. Rogers is still alive. And the people who launched him are suddenly forced to deal with a hero who wasn’t supposed to come back. Gene L. Henderson’s The First Spaceman delivers a sharp, fast-moving science fiction tale filled with absurd heroics, strange technical improvisations, and a wicked sense of humor about bureaucracy, glory, and the strange ways history treats its heroes. Gene L. Henderson wrote science fiction during the early 1950s and published stories in magazines including Startling Stories. The First Spaceman appeared in Startling Stories in 1953, a pulp-era magazine known for adventurous space tales and tongue-in-cheek speculation about the future.