Mack Reynolds 2 hr 49 min read

On a future Africa struggling toward nationhood, agents work to turn warring tribesmen into Africans, one desert clan at a time.

Mack Reynolds's 1961 story, drawing on the author's real travels, follows a two-vehicle caravan to a camp of Taitoq Tuareg, dramatizing the hard work of building a nation from fractured tribes. Serious, informed social SF, unusually engaged with African politics for its era. Read it for thoughtful, ground-level golden-age SF about development, identity, and the making of a people.

In its time

Published in 1961, during the 1960s, new wave revolutionizes the genre.

Reading it

2 hr 49 min read (a novel-length work, settle in).

Illustrated by

John Schoenherr