Melvin Sturgis 38 min read

Barely a day after the first shack goes up on a new world, four surveyors carry in a savagely beaten teammate, the first sign that this planet's harmless-seeming natives are not what they appear.

Melvin Sturgis's 1956 story is a sharp first-contact and social-SF tale. Clever, pointed golden-age SF. Read it for a tense colonization story where casual assumptions about a 'primitive' species meet a hard correction, in a well-turned golden-age piece about arrogance, exploitation, and the unprotected.

In its time

Published in 1956, during the 1950s, post-war optimism meets cold war anxiety.

Reading it

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