H. B. Fyfe 9 min read

A skilled diplomatic mission, Space Marshal Hennings reflects, can turn the most smashing battle-success into a fabulous Pyrrhic victory, and he does not relish marching past that heap of a monument.

H. B. Fyfe's 1961 story is a wry military and social-SF space opera. Clever, satirical golden-age SF. Read it for a genial send-up of diplomacy and war, where a triumphant military man's peace mission threatens to squander every advantage his fleet has won, in the tangle of interstellar politics.

In its time

Published in 1961, during the 1960s, new wave revolutionizes the genre.

Reading it

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

Illustrated by

H. R. Van Dongen