Frank Banta 9 min read

Division Chief Wattles rises from his after-lunch nap without refreshment, Kenton has had the gall to request time off to build a new house, and it's worse, John, than merely falling production.

Frank Banta's 1962 story is a wry first-contact and social-SF workplace comedy. Clever, funny golden-age SF. Read it for a genial satire of Venusport bureaucracy, where a colonist's small act of independence rattles the padded division chiefs, and the dragon-slayers of the title prove unexpectedly ordinary.

In its time

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

Reading it

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