H. B. Fyfe 31 min read

On rough Boyd III, a world cursed with one moon too many, wild tides, wilder weather, and worse-tempered natives, surveyor Pete Guthrie faces survival not of the fittest but of the meanest.

H. B. Fyfe's 1957 story is a rugged adventure and colonization tale. Vivid, atmospheric golden-age SF. Read it for a colorful survival yarn on a harsh, chaotic frontier planet, where a surveyor must outlast a hostile world and its ill-tempered inhabitants, in a well-turned golden-age piece of frontier grit and alien menace.

In its time

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

Reading it

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

Illustrated by

Paul Orban