Jack Taylor 22 min read

On the far world Xenon, the rule that cataloguing duty is never pleasant, often dangerous, and always hard meets its exception, but who needs a lady on a far world, anyway?

Jack Taylor's 1956 story is a wry dystopian and social-SF space opera. Clever, pointed golden-age SF. Read it for a genial frontier-of-space tale where a survey world proves the exception to every hard rule, and the moralist of the title complicates matters in unexpected ways.

In its time

Published in 1956, during the 1950s, post-war optimism meets cold war anxiety.

Reading it

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

Illustrated by

Weiss