Mack Reynolds 10 min read

Two king-sized bands blare the Internationale and the Star-Spangled Banner in a Götterdämmerung of acoustics, as Marshal Ignatov strides stiff-kneed toward the conference hall.

Mack Reynolds's 1960 story is a sharp dystopian social-SF satire of Cold War diplomacy hardened into ritual. Clever, biting golden-age SF. Read it for Reynolds skewering the superpower stalemate, where an endlessly repeated summit has calcified into empty tradition, and the two sides are more alike than either admits.

In its time

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

Reading it

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