Kate Wilhelm 24 min read

Hard, impatient Captain Winters, sent to evacuate a colony world, has no patience for the villagers who cling to their crops and homes, but there is much even he can still learn about love and death.

Kate Wilhelm's 1962 story is a thoughtful, humane social-SF space opera. Sharp, affecting golden-age SF. Read it for an early story by a future master, a rigid officer confronting the human cost of his orders and the stubborn attachments of ordinary people, in a quietly powerful golden-age tale of duty, feeling, and a captain's reckoning.

In its time

Published in 1962, during the 1960s, new wave revolutionizes the genre.

Reading it

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

Illustrated by

Jack Gaughan