Robert Silverberg 34 min read

On the world of Markin, where a red sunset means coming trouble, Colonel Devall, more scholar than soldier, heads a Terran mission whose next choice will govern a boy's fate, and Earth's future.

Robert Silverberg's 1958 story is a thoughtful colonization and social-SF tale. Sharp, humane golden-age SF. Read it for an early Silverberg story of cultural collision, where a well-meaning commander must weigh justice, custom, and consequence on an alien world, in a well-crafted golden-age piece about the heavy responsibilities of the overlord's thumb.

In its time

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

Reading it

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

Illustrated by

Bill Bowman