Allen Kim Lang 1 hr 32 min read

Lieutenant Lee Hartford sing-songs cadence to his three dozen troopers, 'Three weeks in the woods, eating squeeze-tube beans; we'd be better off in the Fleet Marines', on a strange colonial world.

Allen Kim Lang's 1962 story is a wry, inventive military-SF and colonization tale. Clever, satirical golden-age SF. Read it for a genial story of soldiers kept obsessively germ-free on an alien planet, where the whole apparatus of chemical purity conceals a sharp point about fear and contamination.

In its time

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

Reading it

1 hr 32 min read (a novella, a full arc in one sitting or two).

Illustrated by

Mack