Ralph Williams 23 min read

The riot starts late one thirty-hour Sunday afternoon in the alley behind John McCullough's half-built log house on Centaurus II, and McCullough is in at the start of it, and at the end.

Ralph Williams's 1955 story is a sharp colonization and social-SF tale of tension on a frontier colony world. Sharp, atmospheric golden-age SF. Read it for a story where the hard business of settling an alien planet boils over into conflict, seen through one settler's eyes.

In its time

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

Reading it

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

Illustrated by

Paul Orban