Hal Annas 52 min read

Susan Wildress knows that what she's about to do may mean death. In a hall of tense girl faces, she opens a locket and remembers the day, three years past, when the boys marched off to war.

Hal Annas's 1953 story is a grim, moving military space opera of a world that has spent its young men. Sharp, affecting golden-age SF. Read it for a story of endless war and terrible sacrifice, and a young woman's desperate act when there are no sons left to die.

In its time

Published in 1953, during the 1950s, post-war optimism meets cold war anxiety.

Reading it

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