Read "The Snowbank Orbit" by Fritz Leiber online for free on Textopian. Full text with search, annotations, highlights, and AI-powered reading aids.
Earth could not stop the Enemy's remorseless advance from outer space. Neither could the Enemy!
The pole stars of the other planets cluster around Polaris and Octans, but Uranus spins on a snobbishly different axis between Aldebaran and Antares. The Bull is her coronet and the Scorpion her footstool. Dear blowzy old bitch-planet, swollen and pale and cold, mad with your Shakespearean moons, white-mottled as death from Venerean Plague, spinning on your side like a poisoned pregnant cockroach, rolling around the sun like a fat drunken floozie with green hair rolling on the black floor of an infinite bar-room, what a sweet last view of the Solar System you are for a cleancut young spaceman.