Earl Goodale 36 min read

Once his name was Ameet Ruxt, his skin was light blue, and he was a low-ranking statistician of the Haldorian Empire, which is to say, exactly the man they draft into their endless Invasion Forces.

Earl Goodale's 1960 story is a wry military space opera told from the losing end of a warrior society. Clever, satirical golden-age SF. Read it for a genial tale where a put-upon alien conscript, bottom of his empire's totem pole, navigates the absurdities of a culture forever bent on conquest.

In its time

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

Reading it

36 min read (a novelette, room for a turn or two).

Illustrated by

Wallace Wood