Robert Hoskins 54 min read

Clouds hide the three moons as the men slip into the village, axes ready, and at Luke Royceton's banshee scream, they fire the huts, for their one mission in the galaxy is to make more problems.

Robert Hoskins's 1963 story is a sharp social-SF space opera with an ironic premise. Clever, pointed golden-age SF. Read it for a story where a galactic agency deliberately stirs up trouble on peaceful worlds, and the strange logic of the problem makers slowly reveals its purpose.

In its time

Published in 1963, during the 1960s, new wave revolutionizes the genre.

Reading it

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