Allen Kim Lang 30 min read

'I've sweated for months over the plans for this campaign,' Captain Winfree tells the Major, but the war they wage is a war of frantic, compulsory consumption.

Allen Kim Lang's 1955 story is a wry dystopian social-SF satire of forced consumerism. Clever, funny golden-age SF. Read it for a genial send-up of an economy that compels its citizens to consume, where duty means spending, and the great potlatch riots are a battle over the mandate to buy.

In its time

Published in 1955, during the 1950s, post-war optimism meets cold war anxiety.

Reading it

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