A Planet Named Joe

The year is 1955. The Cold War is heating up. And somewhere on Venus, a man named Joe has gone missing, or perhaps he hasn't. Major Polk has been handed the kind of mission that makes a career officer question everything: locate a single Venusian citizen out of millions who all share the same name. What follows is a sparkling exercise in bureaucratic futility, as Polk discovers that communication across the solar system is as broken as it is on Earth, and that sometimes the simplest tasks become the most maddening. Evan Hunter, writing as William S. Brady, crafts a lean, sharp satire that plays both as comic entertainment and pointed commentary on the nascent space age. At just 24 pages, it's a whipcrack of a story that knows exactly how much ground it needs to cover, and covers it with gleeful precision.