Paul Myron Anthony Linebarger 6 min read

In 2127, Tibet and America, each claiming the Radiant Heat Monopoly, apply for a War Permit, a bloodless duel of five aero-ships fought by strict rules over the rented territory of Kerguelen.

Paul Linebarger's 1928 story, his first, written at seventeen, later famous as Cordwainer Smith, is a prophetic military-SF tale. Sharp, precocious, historically fascinating. Read it for the earliest work of one of SF's greatest visionaries, a startlingly modern vision of tidy, televised, rule-bound future warfare, a remarkable glimpse of the young genius who would become Cordwainer Smith.

In its time

Published in 1928, during the 1920s, the pulp era proper.

Reading it

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