Wasp
You could summarize this story as action/adventure and still do it a disservice. This is about an agent dropped on an enemy planet with one goal: to disrupt, distract, and generally raise hell with the planetary administration in a textbook example of unconventional psychological warfare. Russell had a theory that one man can, with minimal support, completely discombobulate a planet to the point where its military effectiveness would be severely diminished. This book is his theory expressed as a novel.
Stats for nerds
4recommend
5mentions
4people
2011–2023years
100% recommend
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- Ah, I suspect you refer to Henlein? His digressions into mid-century philosophy can become tedious.
On the other hand the Gateway series (Frederik Poul) is still one of my favorites. And Wasp by Eric Frank Russell is in my top 3.
- yeah mine is 95% paperbacks. Most in somewhat-poor condition. They were printed cheap 70 years ago, and the fact they are still viable is an achievement in itself. They are getting hard to find now, partly because 2nd hand bookshops don't stock them because the condition is too bad.
I imagine younger readers would struggle to get into the genre, although I think a lot of the big classics are still accessible. Seeing Dune as a big recent movie shows, I think, that a lot of the themes were tireless and haven't changed. I'm often amazed at how some things could have been written today, with the same social angst, but were written in the 40's or 50's. Poul's insight into advertising (The Space Merchants), Bradbury's commentary on censorship and offence (Fahrenheit 451) are both ones that spring to mind. But these are not isolated examples - there are lots of others. (Erik Frank Russell's Wasp is a perennial favourite and works as well today as ever.)
- >...information operations are now a part or modern warfare...
Information/disinformation operations have been a part of warfare since... ...forever it seems. It is - certainly - nothing new. The medium has merely changed and that's what important to the staging of the front[s], as it were.
You should pick up a copy of Eric Frank Russell's WASP[0], if you haven't read it before. It's a very good read in this area.
- There's also the related observation, demonstrated in Eric Frank Russell's Wasp [1], that merely leaving behind the signs of tampering is enough to cause fear and panic.
In the novel, which is written as a deliciously dark satire in the vein of Kurt Vonnegut Jr., a single agent causes havoc in a foreign country by subtly creating evidence of a mass sabotage by an underground guerilla force: Spreading rumours, distributing provocative stickers and posters, leaking assasination target lists, strategically leaving surveillance equipment to be discovered by the authorities, and so on. He doesn't actually perform any acts of sabotage.
If Wasp had been written in 2019, flying drones at airports would have fit right into the narrative.
- I highly recommend the science fiction of Eric Frank Russell. Especially Wasp (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0575070951/)
Russell is a great writer. And funny.
The Great Explosion (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/088184991X/) is another good one.
