Robert Silverberg 20 min read

After a month alone in the jungle following a quarrel with Lois, Jim Reese sees the low plastic domes of Colony Eight, the most welcome sight in weeks, and a drunken native straggling to meet him.

Robert Silverberg's 1957 story is a colonization space opera of frontier settlements and native trouble on a jungle world. Vivid, atmospheric golden-age SF. Read it for a story where a man's homecoming to his colony, after a lovers' quarrel, opens onto a larger and stranger crisis.

In its time

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

Reading it

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