Talents, Incorporated

Talents, Incorporated was first published in 1962) at the height of the Cold War. The order of the day was MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction) and Murray Leinster, pseudonym for William F. Jenkins, author of Talents, Incorporated, does a better job of presenting the absurdity of governing for defeat than does Wibberley. Wibberley assails the patronizing near Imperialism of the anti-Communist frenzy of the era. Both are hilarious, disconcerting, and mesmerizing. Wibberley chronicled the relationships of a fictional duchy that declared war on the U.S. with attendant economic benefits while Leinster chronicles a fictional space empire that is potentially foiled by an eccentric assortment of freaks—empathic, polymath, precognitive, dowser, paranoid, etc. (Goodreads)