Frank M. Robinson 33 min read

How do you arrange marriages when the men are in one solar system and the women in another, and neither will leave home? Karl Allen heaves on a line of logs while his stubborn yllumphs look on.

Frank M. Robinson's 1952 story is a wry colonization and social-SF comedy. Clever, funny golden-age SF. Read it for a genial story of interstellar mail-order matchmaking, where the logistics of importing brides to a frontier world lead to complications no marriage broker anticipated.

In its time

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

Reading it

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

Illustrated by

Ed Emshwiller