Randall Garrett Robert Silverberg 11 min read

Larry Filmore stares at his beer and roasts his fight manager for the fiftieth time, a human prizefighter who's battled a good many races across the Galaxy and has the scars to prove it.

Randall Garrett and Robert Silverberg's 1957 story (as Ivar Jorgensen) is a rousing space-opera adventure of interstellar prizefighting. Fast, punchy golden-age SF. Read it for a colorful tale where an Earthman brawler faces an alien champion, and picks up more than he bargained for before the big fight.

In its time

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

Reading it

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