Corporate warfare becomes deadly as the state crumbles

Robert Asprin was best known for the humorous fantasy series MythAdventure and for creating the influential Thieves' World series of anthologies which ran from 1979 to 1989. But before launching either of those long-running enterprises, Asprin got his start in science fiction. His story of corporate mercenaries in the August 1977 issue of Analog was followed immediately by a full-length version, his debut novel The Cold Cash War.

Fairly obscure today, this novel is a precursor to cyberpunk which explores a new kind of corporate warfare, fought by non-lethal means and in secrecy. A product of a very particular moment in the late 1970s, how well does The Cold Cash War stand up today, and what contemporary relevance does it have?

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The definitive travel guide to a place that never existed

Like J. G. Ballard's Crash - featured in episode 149 - Last Letters From Hav is another novel which might challenge or expand definitions of science fiction. Originally published in 1985, the book is a work of veteran British travel writer Jan Morris, who died in 2020. Sitting comfortably alongside her books on cities like Oxford, Venice, and New York, it is a travelogue - the difference being that Hav is a fictional place. But what is it that makes Hav such a strangely believable locale? And what qualifies it as science fiction?

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The influential classic of enhanced intelligence with a breakneck pace

An early novel by Poul Anderson, Brain Wave (1954) is also a landmark science fiction story on the topic of intelligence enhancement. Unlike in the later Flowers for Algernon (1966) - see episode 148 - an explosive rise of brainpower is not the work of human scientists. Instead, the whole world gets a huge intelligence boost, as the Earth exits a vast cosmic field which for millions of years had inhibited "certain electromagnetic and electrochemical processes". Can society survive this colossal, overnight shift? And if so, what does it mean for the human future?

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