Robert Silverberg 21 min read

'We'll be dumping you any minute,' the patrolman tells condemned Yorkan Varr, bound for Earth, the galaxy's garbage world, though Varr swears he killed no one.

Robert Silverberg's 1957 story is a sharp social-SF and space-opera tale of exile to a despised Earth. Sharp, ironic golden-age SF. Read it for a story where a protesting convict is cast down to a planet that has become the Galaxy's dustbin, and what he finds there.

In its time

Published in 1957, during the 1950s, post-war optimism meets cold war anxiety.

Reading it

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