Richard McKenna 1 hr 18 min read

Red-haired Flinter Cole rides the freighter Gorbals toward the hermit planet of New Cornwall, nothing published about it in five hundred years, and the meanest men the cook ever saw waiting below.

Richard McKenna's 1958 story is an atmospheric colonization and social-SF tale by the author of 'The Sand Pebbles.' Sharp, evocative golden-age SF. Read it for a richly drawn story of an outsider arriving on a closed, forbidding world, where an old, dark ritual, the night of Hoggy Darn, is about to come round again.

In its time

Published in 1958, during the 1950s, post-war optimism meets cold war anxiety.

Reading it

1 hr 18 min read (a novella, a full arc in one sitting or two).

Illustrated by

Ed Emshwiller