David Mason 11 min read

Every planet badly needs family men, but surely not the same family man on all of them? Garrity, they say, was the architect of his own peculiar disasters.

David Mason's 1956 story mines wry comedy from a space engineer whose theory about colonizing worlds lands him in very unusual trouble. Light, funny golden-age SF. Read it for a droll tale of a man whose grand scheme for populating the planets comes back to haunt him spectacularly.

In its time

Published in 1956, during the 1950s, post-war optimism meets cold war anxiety.

Reading it

11 min read (a short story, a single idea, delivered and gone).

Illustrated by

Ray