Randall Garrett 55 min read

History is a fluid thing, and men have long known that changing the past can change the present, and that words are the most powerful magic of all for reshaping what once was.

Randall Garrett's 1957 story is a clever social-SF space opera about the making of legends. Sharp, thoughtful golden-age SF. Read it for an inventive story exploring how heroes and history are manufactured, how propaganda, myth, and the manipulation of memory can shape a past to serve the present, in a well-turned golden-age piece with a pointed idea at its core.

In its time

Published in 1957, during the 1950s, post-war optimism meets cold war anxiety.

Reading it

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

Illustrated by

Ed Emshwiller