H. Beam Piper 35 min read

When the deer crash across his path, the lone hunter wishes he had the rifle, but tracking them come morning will be easy, as the white front of the Ice-Father looms clear between the massing clouds.

H. Beam Piper's 1957 story is a haunting post-apocalyptic and social-SF tale set in an ice-age far future. Sharp, evocative golden-age SF. Read it for a quietly powerful story of a lone hunter in a frozen tomorrow, keeper of a mysterious ancestral trust, in a tale that reaches across unimaginable spans of time.

In its time

Published in 1957, during the 1950s, post-war optimism meets cold war anxiety.

Reading it

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