Stephen Marlowe 32 min read

The natives of Halcyon love the joke: their planet's name means 'peaceful,' yet they've never strung three quiet years together in two millennia, as an insurance agent reports to his baffled boss.

Stephen Marlowe's 1955 story, told through letters home, is a wry first-contact and social-SF satire. Clever, funny golden-age SF. Read it for a droll story where a hard-luck insurance man tries to make sense of a war-loving world ironically named for peace.

In its time

Published in 1955, during the 1950s, post-war optimism meets cold war anxiety.

Reading it

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

Illustrated by

W. E. Terry