H. Beam Piper 4 hr 32 min read

On a terrace above white-towered Wardshaven, under a peach-yellow sky and a huge red sun, a man and woman stand arm in arm, and his eye catches a distant twinkle he does not want to think about.

H. Beam Piper's 1962 novel is a superb military space opera of vengeance and civilization-building among the fallen worlds. Gripping, intelligent, deeply satisfying. Read it for one of the great space operas, a nobleman turned raider whose quest for revenge becomes something far larger, from a master of the form.

In its time

Published in 1962, during the 1960s, new wave revolutionizes the genre.

Reading it

4 hr 32 min read (a novel-length work, settle in).

Illustrated by

John Schoenherr