Kris Neville 36 min read

To spread mankind to the stars carries a high cost in lives, and not all of them are human. On the acid-eroded plateaus of Miracastle, the first two-stage world man ever dared, that cost comes due.

Kris Neville's 1962 story sets a hard military space opera on a forbidding, far-flung colony world. Atmospheric, thoughtful golden-age SF. Read it for a story about the brutal price of colonization, paid on one of the bleakest planets humanity has ever reached for.

In its time

Published in 1962, during the 1960s, new wave revolutionizes the genre.

Reading it

36 min read (a novelette, room for a turn or two).