“Vulcan's Workshop,” a 1930s short story written by Harl Vincent

Thanks to Dave Tackett of the blog QuasarDragon, I recently read “Vulcan’s Workshop,” an old short story written by Harl Vincent. Originally published in the June 1932 issue of Astounding Stories magazine and downloadable for free from the website ManyBooks.net, the story is about Luke Fenton, a gorilla-like creature with a troubled past, and the Vulcan’s Worskhop, a dreaded Martian prison camp. Here are the opening lines of the story:

Savagely cursing, Luke Fenton reeled backward from the porthole, his great hairy paws clapped over his eyes. No one had warned him, and he did not know that total blindness might result from gazing too earnestly into the sun's unscreened flaming orb, especially with that body not more than twenty million miles distant in space. ...

According to the story, the desolate planet Vulcan was discovered in 1859 by one Lescarbault, a French physician.