Margaret St. Clair 7 min read

In the hour before dawn on a new world circling Proxima, the crew sits in the dark and talks, Rossiter troubled that they killed the natives who met them, two spears against forty blasters.

Margaret St. Clair's 1952 story is a somber colonization and social-SF tale of a bad beginning. Sharp, atmospheric golden-age SF. Read it for a quietly disturbing story where colonists' first act on an alien world is a slaughter, and the guilt of it haunts the fragile start of their new life.

In its time

Published in 1952, during the 1950s, post-war optimism meets cold war anxiety.

Reading it

7 min read (a short story, a single idea, delivered and gone).