Tom Godwin 3 hr 43 min read

The Gern battle cruiser breaks through the clouds, tall and black and beautifully deadly, come to destroy them, and for two hundred years Humbolt's people have waited to fight the mighty Gern Empire.

Tom Godwin's 1958 novel (originally 'The Survivors') is a rousing colonization and survival space opera. Gripping, defiant golden-age SF. Read it for a stirring tale of marooned humans who, across generations, forge themselves from helpless castaways into a people ready to take on an empire.

In its time

Published in 1958, during the 1950s, post-war optimism meets cold war anxiety.

Reading it

3 hr 43 min read (a novel-length work, settle in).