Poul Anderson 34 min read

'Look around you, Jorun. This is Earth, the old home of all mankind, you cannot go off and forget it.' But old Kormt, Speaker for Solis Township, has thought it through, and his answer is no.

Poul Anderson's 1954 story is a moving, elegiac social-SF space opera of an ending. Poignant, resonant golden-age SF. Read it for a beautifully melancholy tale where humanity must abandon Earth for the stars, and one stubborn old man's refusal to leave becomes the closing of a chapter for the whole race.

In its time

Published in 1954, during the 1950s, post-war optimism meets cold war anxiety.

Reading it

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