H. Beam Piper 1 hr 8 min read

How do you fight a native superstition with logic, when a whole planet of workers believes the world is about to end, and the belief itself threatens to bring civilization down?

H. Beam Piper's 1960 story is a shrewd colonization and social-SF tale of faith, reason, and crisis on an alien world. Sharp, thoughtful golden-age SF. Read it for a story where an administrator must handle a doomsday cult armed not with weapons but with belief, and the strange 'magic' of Terran technology.

In its time

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

Reading it

1 hr 8 min read (a novelette, room for a turn or two).