Julian F. Grow 18 min read

Slate-gray eyes sweep the saloon and stop on one man: 'I want you, Dirty Jake. Now.' The big stranger's hand hovers over his Colt, and Dirty Jake shoots him into doll rags, naturally.

Julian F. Grow's 1961 story is a wry, inventive social-SF space opera with a Western skin. Clever, funny golden-age SF. Read it for a genial tale that opens like a shoot-'em-up and reveals itself as something stranger, where the fastest gun in the Old West is very far indeed from where, and when, he seems.

In its time

Published in 1961, during the 1960s, new wave revolutionizes the genre.

Reading it

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