Tom Godwin 39 min read

The Church of the Golden Rule opposed the war against Alkoria, so the Vogarian State liquidated them, all but two thousand Saints sentenced to the moon mines, whose prison ship never arrived.

Tom Godwin's 1961 story is a sharp first-contact and social-SF tale of tyranny and defiance. Clever, pointed golden-age SF. Read it for a story where a ruthless militarist state confronts the vanished 'Golden Saints' it thought it had destroyed, and the helpful hand of God proves to work in unexpected ways.

In its time

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

Reading it

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

Illustrated by

Barberis