Jerome Bixby 10 min read

Aboard the colony ship Exodus VII, the wives have gone on strike, no babies, no sex, leaving the Chief Medical Officer to plead over the fate of a colony that cannot survive without children.

Jerome Bixby's 1952 story is a sharp colonization and social-SF tale. Pointed, provocative golden-age SF. Read it for a story that turns the survival of a struggling space colony on a rebellion of its women, in a well-turned golden-age piece, with real edge, about reproduction, autonomy, and the hard arithmetic of keeping a fragile human outpost alive.

In its time

Published in 1952, during the 1950s, post-war optimism meets cold war anxiety.

Reading it

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

Illustrated by

Kelly Freas