Kris Neville 1 hr 14 min read

On a generation-starship whose crew will never live to see journey's end, the priest comes to address an impatient, drawling folk who have made strange changes in their way of life, and death.

Kris Neville's 1963 story is a wry, unsettling social-SF space opera. Sharp, ironic golden-age SF. Read it for a memorable tale of a generation ship whose long-isolated inhabitants have devolved into a strange backwoods culture with peculiar customs, told with dark humor and a chilling twist, in a well-turned golden-age piece about the fate of the stranded starfarers.

In its time

Published in 1963, during the 1960s, new wave revolutionizes the genre.

Reading it

1 hr 14 min read (a novelette, room for a turn or two).