Dave Dryfoos 23 min read

Chained like an animal in an alien village after three years as a starving prisoner, Chet Barfield hears the swish-roar-scream of a spaceship overhead, and his heart leaps at the thought of rescue.

Dave Dryfoos's 1954 story is a thoughtful AI-and-social-SF tale. Sharp, humane golden-age SF. Read it for a moving story of captivity, dignity, and what it means to be a man, where a broken prisoner among primitive aliens must reclaim his humanity, in a well-turned golden-age piece about degradation, hope, and the uniform of a man.

In its time

Published in 1954, during the 1950s, post-war optimism meets cold war anxiety.

Reading it

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

Illustrated by

Rudolph Palais