Mack Reynolds 19 min read

They said there must have been a woman in his past to make him what he was, and there had, though no flesh-and-blood female: his lady was Victory herself, and his hungry dream of greatness.

Mack Reynolds's 1960 story is a sharp colonization and first-contact tale of a driven frontiersman. Clever, thoughtful golden-age SF. Read it for a story of an ambition-haunted survey engineer on a raw new world, whose need to achieve something great leads him toward a discovery, and a reckoning, he never planned.

In its time

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

Reading it

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

Illustrated by

Wallace Wood