George O. Smith 18 min read

Professor Milton has a famous plan to end the strife between East and West, split the Earth in two, literally, and let each side go its way, and the terrible trouble is that he can actually do it.

George O. Smith's 1950 story is a clever dystopian and hard-SF tale. Sharp, provocative golden-age SF. Read it for an audacious Cold War thought-experiment carried to a literal, world-cleaving extreme, told with Smith's engineering ingenuity and dry wit, in a well-turned golden-age piece that takes an impossible political fantasy and makes it alarmingly concrete.

In its time

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

Reading it

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

Illustrated by

Milton Luros