Lester Del Rey 1 hr 8 min read

After fourteen years of a war that was never the singing kind, Captain Duke O'Neill hears his men break into song, and knows, at last, that they are going home to Meloa in victory.

Lester del Rey's 1955 story is a taut military-SF and social-SF tale. Sharp, thoughtful golden-age SF. Read it for a hard-edged story of long war, hard-won victory, and its bitter aftermath, where the meaning of triumph proves more complicated than the singing suggests, in a well-turned golden-age piece about the true costs of winning.

In its time

Published in 1955, during the 1950s, post-war optimism meets cold war anxiety.

Reading it

1 hr 8 min read (a novelette, room for a turn or two).