#183 Hostile takeover: The Cold Cash War (1977) by Robert Asprin

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?

For more classic SF reviews and discussion, visit andyjohnson.xyz. To get free weekly classic SF updates, sign up here.

Transcript

Science fiction has frequently depicted corporate power in the ascendancy, a theme particularly associated with the cyberpunk that came of age in the 1980s, alongside the ruinous logic of Reaganomics and Thatcherism. SF writers like William Gibson imagined vast corporate concerns displacing the power of the state, imposing their will on the population against a backdrop of rapidly advancing technology. Immense corporate power is one aspect of cyberpunk which resonates troublingly with today’s reality.

Originally published in 1977, Robert Asprin’s debut novel The Cold Cash War was written before the emergence of cyberpunk but shares its emphasis on corporate dominance. Set in a future 1990s, the novel imagines a world bent to the will of a few sprawling monopolies with sweeping control over whole segments of the economy. These private combines begin to wage covert simulated wars to more efficiently adjudicate conflicts over resources and markets. When one battle spills out onto American streets and into the public eye, it triggers a deadly conflict between corporate power and government authority.

The Cold Cash War is a product of a particular moment, after the humiliating U.S. defeat in the Vietnam War and before the rise of the corporate culture of the 1980s. While dated and flawed in a number of ways, Asprin’s novel is an interesting precursor both to cyberpunk and today’s landscape of new corporate monopolies.

Waging fake wars

While no date is given for the events of The Cold Cash War, a 1990s setting can be inferred from a reference to the 1970 suicide of Japanese ultranationalist Yukio Mishima having taken place “over twenty years ago”. In this imagined future, capitalism is triumphant and the communist bloc has withdrawn from world affairs following a war between China and the Soviet Union. In the West, corporate consolidation is so far advanced that whole economic sectors are controlled by single, hugely powerful combines.

Fearful that conflict over resources and markets will damage their bottom line, the corporate monopolies agree to use simulated wars to settle their differences. They clandestinely hire territory from amenable governments, and employ highly trained mercenaries to act as their battlefield representatives. These corporate troops wear sophisticated “killsuits”, which - when registering shots from special non-lethal weapons - render the user immobile until the engagement is concluded.

Army buddies Tidwell and Clancy serve on opposite sides of a staged war fought in the Brazilian jungle by the Communications and Oil combines. Following inexplicable combat failures, both mercenaries defect to a third party - a Japanese zaibatsu looking to train up its own troops. Tidwell and Clancy find themselves well positioned when the secret wars are exposed to government scrutiny, and the corporations seize the chance to defeat and displace the incompetent, ill-trained forces of the old governments.

From the barracks to the boardroom

Robert Asprin (1946 - 2008) was born in Michigan and was a graduate of the University of Michigan. As a writer, he is probably best remembered today for his comic fantasy novels in the MythAdventures series, which lasted from 1978 until the final posthumous instalment was published in 2010. He also wrote the humorous Phule’s Company series of military SF novels, mostly in collaboration with Peter J. Heck. 

According to John Clute, “Asprin's reputation lies mainly in the ingenuity of his braiding activities as editor”, particularly his work on the Thieves’ World series which attracted numerous high-profile writers to set fantasy stories in the city of Sanctuary. The Cold Cash War, then, is an outlier in his career. One of his few serious SF novels, it was inspired by his time in the U.S. Army in 1965-66 and his period working for a multinational corporation after that.

Broadly functional

The Cold Cash War is written in a broadly functional, but very readable style which is a good fit for its grounded, near-future setting. Asprin’s premise is rather implausible, projecting huge social, technological, and especially economic changes over just two decades. However, some stylistic flourishes - such as brief news snippets - help to make the novel work and in some limited respects it feels quite prescient. A frame narrative involves an information broker whose methods anticipate today’s analysts of so-called open source intelligence (OSINT).

To a degree, the novel resembles the techno-thriller genre which was emerging at the time; it was published just weeks after Craig Thomas’ Firefox which is often credited with pioneering the genre.

Hostile takeovers

One of the most interesting aspects of The Cold Cash War is its speculations about the future of warfare. In part, the novel likely reflects criticisms of the readiness of the U.S military in the late 1970s, shortly after the bruising defeat in Vietnam. When a shooting war breaks out between government troops and corporate mercenaries, the private armies are shown to be hugely more formidable. This reflects the familiar right-wing claim that businesses are inherently more efficient than states, but hardly seems credible, even in the context of the novel.

The non-lethal wars staged in secret by the corporations have some clear real-world parallels. At the time of publication, the U.S. military was beginning to experiment with laser-based, non-lethal combat simulations for training purposes. By the mid-1980s, this concept had been adapted for civilian recreational purposes as laser tag. 

The novel correctly identifies the critical and growing importance of signals intelligence in warfare. Some of the key victories won by Tidwell and Clancy are made possible by tampering with government communications. Some of Asprin’s other speculations are more fanciful, like the deployable jump pad that Tidwell uses to leap over a high security fence during a simulated stealth mission in Brazil.

“Horrifyingly plausible”?

The novel’s politics are also of interest. Asprin’s sympathies seem to lie with the corporations and their mercenaries, as he depicts them as not only more effective than their government enemies, but also more moral. The novel has similarities with the work of Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, especially Oath of Fealty (1981), which also predicts a conflict between the private and public sectors in which the former wins out.

By the end of the novel, a corporate takeover is far advanced and it is said that “the only reason the governments still exist today is because they do a lot of the scut work the corporations don’t want to dirty their hands with”. The novel implies a certain ambivalence on Asprin’s part about this scenario. Text inside the jacket of the UK first edition describes the novel as “horrifyingly plausible”.

Tidwell and Clancy’s deployment to Japan, to train and command zaibatsu troops there, is a rather sketchy and orientalist depiction of the country. It is also a relatively early example of SF which focuses on the rise of Japan as an economic power, which would be a recurring feature of cyberpunk in the 1980s.

While a flawed novel, The Cold Cash War is an interesting document of a particular time. At its best, it anticipates trends that would emerge more fully in the 1980s, from the cyberpunk of Neuromancer (1984) to the murderous corporate conflicts of RoboCop (1987). While Asprin left this hard-edged science fiction approach behind in favour of his comic fantasies, he also left a mark.