Robert Moore Williams 15 min read

In the noon glare of a wild desert, the threat is invisible, but Nora wonders why they were stupid enough to come, and Pike keeps his rifle's cross hairs where the next native will appear.

Robert Moore Williams's 1957 story is a tense psi-powers and social-SF tale of colonists under siege. Sharp, atmospheric golden-age SF. Read it for a gripping frontier-planet story where beleaguered settlers face relentless native attackers, and the strange truth of the title, the next time we die, slowly emerges.

In its time

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

Reading it

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