Alan Edward Nourse 24 min read

It was the wrong year for a ship from Earth to land on Baron IV, just as the colony predicted its first real bumper crop. Pete Farnam never knew if the timing was planned.

Alan E. Nourse's 1963 story builds a sharp colonization and social-SF tale of colonists facing a fateful visitor from home. Thoughtful, resonant golden-age SF. Read it for a story about a hard-won frontier world and the reckoning that arrives, at the worst possible moment, from Earth.

In its time

Published in 1963, during the 1960s, new wave revolutionizes the genre.

Reading it

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