Paradise Planet by Richard S. Shaver Episode #22

Richard S. Shaver | June 21, 2022

Paradise Planet by Richard S. Shaver Episode #22
Richard S. Shaver

PARADISE PLANET

Episode #22 · Written by Richard S. Shaver · Narrated by Scott Miller

Steve Donay expects danger when he sets down on an unfamiliar planet. What he does not expect is order—farms without waste, cities without noise, and people who never seem troubled by time or uncertainty. The world functions flawlessly, and at first, that perfection feels like rescue.

As days stretch on, Donay realizes that nothing here ever presses forward. The people are serene, welcoming, and unchanging. Their lives follow patterns that never strain or fracture, and their calm begins to feel less like peace and more like surrender. The planet offers comfort without urgency, beauty without friction, and companionship without risk.

Faced with a society that has deliberately altered itself to remove instability and desire, Donay must confront what is lost when growth slows and certainty replaces choice. The question is no longer how to leave—but whether leaving would mean giving up the only future that has already accepted him.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Richard S. Shaver was a prominent—and famously polarizing—voice in science fiction’s magazine era, with fiction and related material appearing in Amazing Stories, Fantastic Adventures, and companion titles that fed the mid-century appetite for sensational speculation. He is most closely associated with “The Shaver Mystery,” a sprawling series of stories and claims promoted through Amazing Stories that described a hidden prehistoric legacy beneath the modern world—complete with ancient machines, subterranean beings, and a lost technology that warped human life from the shadows. The phenomenon drew heavy reader response and lasting controversy, but it also made Shaver a household name among pulp-era sci-fi audiences.

That larger imaginative framework—secret histories, engineered bodies, and humanity altered by forces it barely understands—runs straight through Paradise Planet. The story isn’t interested in rockets and maps so much as the unsettling bargain behind a “perfect” society: a world that has stabilized itself so completely that normal human urgency begins to look like a defect. Shaver frames the conflict as something you can feel in the daily texture of life—how people move, how they react, how they welcome you—and then tightens the pressure until the visitor has to decide what kind of future he can live inside.

Read alongside the Shaver Mystery material, Paradise Planet lands with extra bite. Shaver repeatedly returns to the idea that the real danger is not a monster in the wilderness, but a system that remakes people until they can no longer recognize what they surrendered. Here, the lure isn’t terror—it’s comfort, beauty, and certainty. And the most frightening possibility is that the trap doesn’t need bars, because once the choice is offered, you may find yourself wanting it.

LISTEN TO THE STORY

Listen to Paradise Planet by Richard S. Shaver — a vintage science fiction short story where a perfect world offers comfort without urgency—and escape may mean losing everything.

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The Lost Sci-Fi Podcast is the most listened-to vintage science fiction podcast in the world. Ranked the #1 Science Fiction Podcast in 34 countries and heard in more than 190 countries, the show has surpassed 3.4 million listens.

Each episode features carefully selected stories from the Golden Age of science fiction, professionally narrated. Timeless storytelling the way it was meant to be heard.

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