Gateway to Strangeness
short story by Jack Vance
"Gateway to Strangeness", also titled "Dust of Far Suns" and "Sail 25", is a science fiction novelette by American writer Jack Vance. It was first published in the August 1962 issue of Amazing Stories magazine.
Plot
Eight space trainees apprehensively await their new instructor, Henry Belt. Despite the many strange and outrageous stories they have heard about him, including his legendary drunkenness, one of them notes that all of the top men in space seem to have trained under him.
Since only six trainees can go on the space journey, Belt first assigns each man the task of building three specific devices using identical piles of assorted, mismatched parts. Only one manages to construct a working device. The two men who become the most frustrated by the nearly impossible tasks are dropped. The others board a small spaceship (Sail 25) propelled solely by a solar sail for a flight to Mars. Belt leaves the navigation entirely in their hands. All the while, he makes careful note of their faults (according to his idiosyncratic standards), recording their demerits in his little red book.
“Gateway to Strangeness” enters the record as short story by Jack Vance. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Gateway, Strangeness and short can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Mar 30, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q5527315. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1962.
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This entry incorporates text from “Gateway to Strangeness” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.