Summit

At a summit staged with banners, troops, and ceremonial menace, Marshal Vladimir Ignatov and President James Warren Donlevy perform the rituals of Cold War hostility for the cameras. But once the pageantry falls away, the two old adversaries reveal a sharper truth: they know each other well, and they know their world is trapped in a system that survives on permanent conflict. Over drinks and blunt conversation, they trade jokes, grievances, and candid assessments of their nations' failures. Their talk exposes a civilization ruled by the military-industrial logic of war, where peace would threaten economies, ideologies, and political power on both sides. They also probe religion, hypocrisy, and the way each superpower depends on the other as an enemy to justify its own existence. As they look out at Earth, they reflect on history, the colonization of Venus and Mars, and the catastrophic "Bomb Day" that shaped their divided future. Wry, bleak, and sharply satirical, this is a story of political theater, exhausted rivalries, and the uneasy knowledge that humanity may never escape the cycle it built. This edition has been fully restored with modern typesetting, custom cover design.