
"Once He had Been a Star Master—Now He Dealt in Soul-Shattering Ruin..." Farradyne had committed the one unpardonable error a Space Master could make. He didn't die along with the other 32 passengers when his ship smashed into the Bog on Venus. They broke him—exiled him to the rotting fungus fields of Venus. Now his only desire in existence was to return to the cool, gleaming sea of deep space. And there was a way—only one. But he would have to become the vilest parasite in the universe—peddler of a poison that stripped the spirit, before it consumed the body...."
Author
George Oliver Smith (April 9, 1911 - May 27, 1981) (also known as Wesley Long) was an American science fiction author. He is not to be confused with George H. Smith, another American science fiction author. Smith was an active contributor to Astounding Science Fiction during the Golden Age of Science Fiction in the 1940s. His collaboration with the magazine's editor, John W. Campbell, Jr. was interrupted when Campbell's first wife, Doña, left him in 1949 and married Smith. Smith continued regularly publishing science fiction novels and stories until 1960. His output greatly diminished in the 1960s and 1970s when he had a job that required his undivided attention. He was given the First Fandom Hall of Fame award in 1980. He was a member of the all-male literary banqueting club the Trap Door Spiders, which served as the basis of Isaac Asimov's fictional group of mystery solvers the Black Widowers. Smith wrote mainly about outer space, with such works as Operation Interstellar (1950), Lost in Space (1959), and Troubled Star (1957). He is remembered chiefly for his Venus Equilateral series of short stories about a communications station in outer space. The stories were collected in Venus Equilateral (1947), which was later expanded as The Complete Venus Equilateral (1976). His novel The Fourth "R" (1959) - re-published as The Brain Machine (1968) - was a digression from his focus on outer space, and provides one of the more interesting examinations of a child prodigy in science fiction.