Alpha Centauri—Or Die! by Leigh Brackett
121 pages
Published 1963 (a fixup of two stories published in 1953 and 1954, respectively)
Read from June 26 to June 28
Rating: ★★½ out of 5
Kind of a midcentury standard pulp space adventure, in which a libertarian man's man rebels against the computerized nanny state in order to be manly and play with his rocket. The exquisitely felt humanity of Brackett's The Long Tomorrow is absent here. Our hero's noble Martian wife gets him out of one scrape by play-acting shrewish and hysterical, but that merely bolsters his status as a superior grade of man; the wives of his co-conspirators nag and complain because that's all they're permitted to do in this type of story. A moderately entertaining but ultimately disposable piece -- the best part of it is the title.
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