Albert Teichner 11 min read

On the oviparous, technologically-backward world of Rayna, the uppity fifty-year-old 'kid' Hacker takes a bulldozer to a hilltop, and massacres a bed of Raynan fledglings, in a grim echo of history.

Albert Teichner's 1962 story is a sharp first-contact and hard-SF tale. Pointed, ironic golden-age SF. Read it for a story where an expedition's careless member repeats humanity's darkest colonial patterns on an alien world, and history poetically repeats itself, in a well-turned golden-age piece about arrogance, contact, and the mirror an alien world holds up to us.

In its time

Published in 1962, during the 1960s, new wave revolutionizes the genre.

Reading it

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