John Jakes 16 min read

'This,' says chief Van Isaac, his finger stabbing a violet dot on the star map, 'is our new trouble spot', Valaya, a world of revolution and slaughter, tribe against tribe.

John Jakes's 1956 story is a colorful colonization and first-contact tale of intervention on a burning world. Vivid, driven golden-age SF. Read it for early Jakes, a troubleshooter sent into an alien civil war, where the old gods and new politics collide in something more than a police action.

In its time

Published in 1956, during the 1950s, post-war optimism meets cold war anxiety.

Reading it

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

Illustrated by

Paul Orban