Edgar Pangborn 4 hr 37 min read

Marooned on the red-green planet Lucifer, eleven light-years from home, six human castaways must survive among strange alien races and forge a new life, for on this world, it is the Year One.

Edgar Pangborn's 1953 novel is a warm, humane colonization and first-contact tale. Thoughtful, moving, beautifully written. Read it for a compassionate classic from a master of humane SF, six exiles building a civilization on an alien world and reckoning with two very different native peoples, in a wise and tender novel about trust, goodness, and what it means to begin again.

In its time

Published in 1953, during the 1950s, post-war optimism meets cold war anxiety.

Reading it

4 hr 37 min read (a novel-length work, settle in).