Mack Reynolds 1 hr 30 min read

Old pro Joe Mauser spots the recruiting line from blocks away and hesitates: Baron Haer is watching pennies on this fracas, and old pros don't get old by signing with the losing side.

Mack Reynolds's 1962 story, part of his celebrated Joe Mauser saga, imagines a future where corporations settle disputes through televised, rigidly regulated warfare. Sharp, satirical military-and-social SF. Read it for a shrewd tale of a professional soldier navigating a society that has turned war into corporate spectacle.

In its time

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

Reading it

1 hr 30 min read (a novella, a full arc in one sitting or two).

Illustrated by

Lloyd Birmingham