This is one of a series of posts I am doing as I read the short stories that have won the Hugo award since it was started in 1955.

Source: The Hugo Winners Edited by Isaac Asimov

So my soft spot for this story is that it was award the short story Hugo at the 1961 WordCon for Science Fiction, which was held in my hometown of Seattle. And in a bit if synchronicity, WorldCon will be returning to Seattle in the same year I am reading this story (2025). Now you might be wondering why I am starting this entry with so much talk about Seattle and WorldCon, and the reason is that this is an okay story that I do not have much to say about.

The Longest Voyage is a standard adventure story with the twist of being set on an alien moon. The unusual stellar phenomenon of this moon and the resulting religious beliefs of the crew take up the first quarter of the story and are then quickly forgotten. The rest of the story is taken up by the crew becoming marooned on an island that turns out to have a crashed alien space ship they could use to develop new technology for their society. Indeed, the part of the opening relevant to the plot took up all of about 1-2 pages and the rest could probably have been considered to the waste paper basket.

With that said, Poul is a good writer and this story was certainly entertaining. Poul strikes me as a classic working writing who is earning his living with his craft. While he brings much skill to the task, the story sounds like many that have come before and after. Indeed, this story reads much like a watered-down version of Heart of Darkness with some astronomy and an inspirational moral about needing to discover things for ourselves added on. And there have been many updated and improved versions of this story since. My suggestion would be the Quintaglio Ascension Trilogy by Robert J. Sawyer.

This story in many ways brings us back to the golden age of science fiction where the story is a vehicle for conveying science. Yet Poul, while obviously knowledgeable in this area, does not seem particularly interested in the science since it is relegated to the opening and then quickly forgotten in favor of watching the characters confront the discovery of an alien space ship and technology. There is one more Poul short story on the Hugo short story winner list (No Truce with Kings, 1964). My hope for it is that Poul ditches the science spamming and sticks to showing us his characters and their moral quandaries.