Hayden Howard 20 min read

Beneath a great peach tree grown from Earth stock, an old man and a young one puzzle over charred bones and a gold tooth, relics of a long-ago massacre of colonies.

Hayden Howard's 1953 story is an atmospheric social-SF space opera. Vivid, evocative golden-age SF. Read it for a haunting frontier tale that pieces together a dark colonial history from bones and memory, unfolding a story of conquest, survival, and one unbroken woman, in richly imagined golden-age SF.

In its time

Published in 1953, during the 1950s, post-war optimism meets cold war anxiety.

Reading it

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

Illustrated by

Wallace Wood