Randall Garrett 42 min read

At forty-five, Anketam stretches in contentment, still strong enough to do his day's work for The Chief, a good fifteen years yet before he's retired to minor make-work chores.

Randall Garrett's 1959 story is a thoughtful military and social-SF space opera of servitude and awakening. Sharp, humane golden-age SF. Read it for a story that opens on a contented laborer's ordinary life and slowly reveals the larger structure of power above him, and what it means to be one of the destroyers.

In its time

Published in 1959, during the 1950s, post-war optimism meets cold war anxiety.

Reading it

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