Moral Equivalent

Two Earth spacemen crash on the planet Mala and inadvertently spark a catastrophe. The Malans have spent centuries perfectly emulating Earth culture, so when Kelly and Beliakoff leave behind some books about warfare and politics, the planet's leaders take them as instruction manuals. What follows is a chillingly absurd war fought entirely on the basis of what the Malans understood from popular fiction: heroic charges, noble causes, and glorious victories. They have absorbed the romance of war without any grasp of its actual horror. As the conflict spirals out of control, Kelly and Beliakoff must confront what they've unleashed, and whether they can make the Malans understand the difference between the story of war and the reality. Neville's 1950s novella is a sharp, cold-war era parable about the dangers of importing ideas without understanding their context, and the thin membrane between civilization and chaos.