Captain Herl Hofner arrives on Planet Delight expecting a routine trading stop. What he finds is a world aggressively, almost desperately pleasant: a sanitized paradise renamed from its seedy past, where every surface gleams and every smile feels scripted. The planet was once called Geescow, and someone has gone to tremendous trouble to scrub that history clean. As Hofner digs beneath the polished facade, he discovers the dark underbelly of colonial 'civilization' and the price paid to manufacture delight. Betsy Curtis wrote this in the 1950s, but her sharp satire of manufactured consent and the violence inherent in 'cleaning up' a world reads like it was drafted yesterday. This is early science fiction doing what it does best: using the future to illuminate the present's comfortable cruelties. For readers who want their space opera with teeth.
