Philip K. Dick 41 min read

Humanity has retreated underground and let the robots fight its war, which is going suspiciously well.

Eight years into a nuclear war with the Soviets, the surface of Earth is too radioactive for people, so both sides have withdrawn into deep bunkers and dispatched robot "leadies" to wage the fight above. Taylor, a war-program technician, takes comfort in the daily bulletins of pounded enemy cities, until a nagging question sends a team back up top to see the battlefield for themselves. Philip K. Dick, in an early gem later expanded into a novel, turns a Cold War setup into one of his signature reality-check parables about the stories we're fed and who benefits from them. Read it for peak-anxiety 1950s SF with a very Dickian sting.

In its time

Published in 1953, during the 1950s, post-war optimism meets cold war anxiety.

Reading it

41 min read (a novelette, room for a turn or two).

Illustrated by

Ed Emshwiller