M. C. Pease 15 min read

On the squalid asteroid base of Torran, home only to the scum of the Solar System, Comptroller Marc Polder faces a problem where the path of dishonor may be the high road to virtue.

M. C. Pease's 1958 story is a thoughtful social-SF space opera. Sharp, well-reasoned golden-age SF. Read it for an idea-driven story of duty, ethics, and hard choices on a grubby frontier outpost, where doing right may mean doing wrong, in a cerebral golden-age piece that takes its moral puzzle as seriously as its setting.

In its time

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

Reading it

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