William E. Bentley 13 min read

The ruler of a black-dwarf-sun world convenes his council to hear an incredible prophecy: that a distant race, on achieving spaceflight, will come and destroy his planet.

William E. Bentley's 1954 story is a clever first-contact and social-SF tale of prophecy and its ironies. Sharp, thoughtful golden-age SF. Read it for a story where an alien world's attempt to evade a foretold doom becomes, in the strange logic of prophecy, the very means of fulfilling it.

In its time

Published in 1954, during the 1950s, post-war optimism meets cold war anxiety.

Reading it

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

Illustrated by

Virgil Finlay