Stephen Marlowe 21 min read

'Gun, boy!' Mulveen cries as a thirty-ton saurian comes bellowing out of the swamp, and young Gilbert rams a shell home and thrusts the atomic big-game rifle into the hunter's waiting hands.

Stephen Marlowe's 1956 story is a rousing adventure and colonization tale. Vivid, gripping golden-age SF. Read it for a fast-moving safari yarn on a jungle world of monstrous game, where a young man serves a hardened hunter and learns what it means to face a killing beast, in a well-turned golden-age piece rich with the atmosphere of an alien wilderness.

In its time

Published in 1956, during the 1950s, post-war optimism meets cold war anxiety.

Reading it

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