Frank Banta 10 min read

Five-gun Charles DeCrabbe rides bare-headed down the main street of Featherton, ignoring the menace from the skies as terrified townsfolk cheer, for he has come to clean up the town of whirlybirds.

Frank Banta's 1963 story is a wry social-SF space opera, a science-fiction Western spoof. Fun, clever golden-age SF. Read it for a genial send-up of the frontier-gunslinger tale transposed to an alien planet, where a swaggering hero faces a very strange menace, in a light, well-turned golden-age piece that gleefully crosses the Old West with outer space.

In its time

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

Reading it

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