Frank R. Stockton 2 hr read

When war looms between America and Britain, a syndicate of businessmen offers to take over the whole conflict, waging it scientifically, bloodlessly, with irresistible new weapons of their own.

Frank R. Stockton's 1889 novel is a clever, prophetic military-SF and social-SF tale. Sharp, witty, remarkably foresighted. Read it for an ingenious early vision of technological warfare and privatized conflict, where a business syndicate ends a great-power war by making it too devastating, and too efficient, to fight.

In its time

Published in 1889, during the 1880s, lost races and dying earths.

Reading it

2 hr read (a novella, a full arc in one sitting or two).