Author: Sharifah Williams

If there’s anything we’ve learned from mythology, it’s don’t mess with the gods. In The Games Gods Play by Abigail Owen, one cursed soul gets tangled up in divine distraction when she’s selected as Hades’ champion. Read on to learn more about this spicy, new romantasy, out September 3rd, through an excerpt and artwork from the deluxe limited edition, available for preorder.

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Excerpt – Chapter 4

Hades’ barely-there smile turns condescending. “Was that so hard?”

It’s too…deliberate. Like he’s decided to play this a different way. Only that makes no sense.

But gods don’t have to make sense, I guess.

Drawing the notice of any of them is a bad idea. They are capricious beings who might curse you rather than bless you depending on their mood and the way the breeze is blowing. Especially this one.

“Now, let’s talk about what you think you were doing,” Hades says.

I frown, confused. “I thought you already—”

“And with the Crucible starting tonight, even,” he continues in a disappointed voice, as if I hadn’t spoken.

I sigh. “Do you want an apology before you smite me or something?”

“Most would fall to their knees before me. Beg for my mercy.”

He’s toying with me now. I’m a mouse. He’s a cat. And I’m his dinner.

I swallow hard, trying to force my heart back down my throat. “I’m pretty sure I’m dead either way.” Of course I am. Let’s not heap even more humiliation on my early end. “Would kneeling help?”

His silvery eyes—not dark like I thought at first, but like mercury—swirl with cold amusement. Did I say something funny?

“Is that why you’re here?” I ask. “The Crucible?”

Hades has never participated, and Zeus is hardly his favorite sibling, so why is he at this temple, really?

“I have my own reasons for being here tonight.”

In other words, Don’t ask gods questions, reckless mortal.

“Why did you stop me?” I glance at the temple, ignoring his tone entirely.

Instead of answering, Hades taps his thumb against his chin. “The question is, what do I do with you now?”

Is he enjoying my predicament? I’ve never thought much about the god of death—I’m a little busy with surviving mortality first—but I’m starting to really not like him. If Boone acted more like this, I’d have gotten over him ages ago. “I assume you’re going to send me to the Underworld.”

Seriously, stop talking, Lyra.

Hades hums. “I can do worse than that.”

Just like with Chance, backing down now isn’t an option. “Oh?” I tip my head, pretending like I don’t already know. “I do hear you are creative with your punishments.”

“I’m flattered.” He gives a tiny, mocking bow. “I could make you roll a rock up a hill and never make it to the top, only to start back over every single day for the rest of eternity.”

That already happened to Sisyphus ages ago. “I’m pretty sure Zeus came up with that.”

His lips flatten. “Were you there?”

I shrug. “Either way, it sounds like a vacation. Peaceful, undisturbed labor. When do I start?”

My mouth is going to get me permanently dead.

I’m waiting to end up in the Underworld any second, or maybe for Hades’ famous bident to appear in his hand for him to skewer me with.

Instead, he shakes his head. “I’m not going to kill you. Yet.”

Really? Do I trust him?

He must see the wariness in my eyes, because a muscle tightens in his jaw like he’s irritated I would doubt his word. “Relax, my star.”

I hesitate at the endearment. It clearly means nothing to him. When he doesn’t immediately talk, I manage not to as well, and instead I take in more details about the god standing before me.

He’s not exactly what I expected. I mean, beyond the obvious dark and brooding thing. It’s his clothes. He’s wearing worn boots and jeans, for Elysium’s sake. The jeans sit low on his narrow hips and are paired with a sky-blue button-down shirt rolled up at the sleeves to reveal forearms a deeper tan than I would expect from someone who lives in the Underworld. Who knew forearms could be sexy?

Over the shirt, he wears vintage leather suspenders that I suspect meet in the back at the top of his shoulder blades, side holster–style. The metal rings on the suspenders look like they have a purpose that he’s not using them for right now. Are they for weapons? Or does he have a bad back?

“Do I pass inspection?” he drawls.

I jerk my gaze back up to his face. “You look different than I thought.”

Both eyebrows twitch up. “And what did you expect? All-black clothing? Perhaps a full leather getup?”

Heat flares up my neck. Something like that, actually. “Don’t forget the horns. And maybe a tail.”

“That’s a different god of death.” He makes an exasperated sound, then mutters something about abhorring expectations.

Meeting those expectations, I think he means. Strange that I have something in common with a god. I may be cursed, but damned if I’m going to let it dictate who I am.

“Your home in the Underworld is Erebus,” I say pointedly.

“And?”

“It’s called… Wait for it.” I hold up a hand. “The Land of Shadows.”

Someone should duct tape my mouth shut.

Hades slips his hands in his pockets, casually relaxed in a leashed predator sort of way. “I always thought that naming was unoriginal. It’s the Underworld. Of course there are shadows.”

This conversation seems to be going off the rails a bit. “I guess.” And then, because my brain can’t help itself, I actually consider what he said. “I mean, technically, you’re not the god of shadows or even the goddess of night.” Now I’m on a roll. “And if the fire-and-brimstone thing is true, then it seems like it would be quite well lit down there.”

His eyes glint at me like sharpened knives.

I can’t tell if he’s offended or surprised by my running commentary.

Unfortunately for both of us, I have a good imagination—and a lot of opinions. “You have a perception issue, if you think about it.”

“I have a perception issue,” he repeats.

“Yes, you do. If they can’t see for themselves, mortals will believe what they are told. I was always told that Hades is shrouded in darkness, smells of fire, and is covered in tattoos that can come alive at his will.”

His gaze trails down my body with such slow deliberation, it sends the heat from earlier crawling farther up my neck and into my cheeks. “And yet you’re the one dressed in black and with tattoos, my star,” he points out.

I follow his gaze to my black fitted shirt paired with jeans—so it’s not all black. One sleeve has ridden up slightly to expose the pale skin of my wrist where the black ink tattoo peeks out. Two stars. A third star is on my other wrist, and when I put my arms together, they form Orion’s Belt.

One of the few things I remember before being taken in by the Order is watching Orion move across the sky outside my bedroom window. The constellation is an unchanging, ever-fixed mark in the night.

Is that why he called me his star twice now? I tug the sleeve down.

“So…” He comes out of his casual leaning to step closer. Close enough that I can breathe him in, which is when I learn that the god of death smells like the darkest, most sinful, bitter chocolate.

“What’s your name?” he asks.

I definitely do not want a god knowing my name. “Felix Argos.”

Hades doesn’t call me on the lie. Just watches me, gaze assessing like he’s debating something. A creative new punishment for me, probably.

“So…” I mimic his earlier phrasing and glance to the side of the temple and the way down the mountain. Escape is so close. Just out of reach, like the open door of a birdcage with a cat sitting outside. “What happens now?”

“What did you mean about being cursed?”

Ugh. I don’t want to talk about that. I hedge instead. “You don’t know?”

“Tell me like I don’t.”

“What if I don’t want to?”

He lifts a single eyebrow, and I get the message. Trying not to clench my teeth, I refuse to think about how Hades is only the second person I’ve ever shared this with.

After taking a deep breath, I say in a rush, “Twenty-three years ago, when I was still in my mother’s womb, she and my father came here to make an offering and pray for blessings on the birth. Her water broke, and your brother apparently took offense at her defiling his sacred sanctuary. As punishment, he cursed her baby—me, as it happens—that no one would ever love me. There. End of story.”

His gaze turns colder, so calculating that I take a step back.

“He made you unlovable?” he asks as though he isn’t quite sure he believes me.
I give a jerking nod.

That curse is why my parents gave me up. They said it was the debt, but I know otherwise. It landed me in the Order of Thieves at three years old. It’s why I have no ride-or-die friends. It’s why Boone…

Up until tonight, I’ve tried to convince myself that things could have been worse. I mean, I could have ended up as kraken fodder or with snakes for hair and stone statues as my friends.

But it led me to this moment. Facing a different god. A worse god.

One who obviously finds my curse interesting. Why? Because Zeus gave it to me? The current King of the Gods is a dick. That’s one thing

Hades also agrees with me on. The question is, what is he going to do with me now?

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Artwork From the Deluxe Edition of The Games Gods Play

Tour the dark corners and dangerous underbelly of a magical Shanghai with Jingwen, a showgirl determined to root out what or who is behind a gruesome series of thefts.

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Chapter Two

My grandma’s clinic lies in the attic of a piano bar on Blood Alley, in the bowels that lie between the groomed, sleeping towers of the International Settlement and the French Concession.

In the hellish blue alleys that run under the Bund’s distinguished consulates and banks, neon lamps illuminate the faces of courtesans and gangsters, who are smoking cigarettes in the shadows. Outside a dive bar, a group of boys in white uniforms—sailors in the American navy—nudge each other and whisper behind their hands, nodding at me. But on the other side of the street, a group of silver-handed gangsters from the Blue Dawn are keeping watch, steel sabres ready to be drawn at any second, making the sailors think twice about going after a Chinese woman.

Inside the Cabaret Volieré, merriment and abandon overflow like the foam atop a mug of beer. The Texan pianist is playing honky-tonk with his callused fingers on a peeling, out-of-tune grand piano, occasionally missing notes due to the broken keys. Knockoff absinthe, made in some British swindler’s bathtub, makes its rounds on brass trays. Everybody is drunk. The dresses are falling off the shoulders of the taxi dancers, who are lying across the laps of their patrons, their makeup smudged.

I run up the stairs behind the piano, past the couples tangled in each other’s skin on the second-floor lounge, to the closed door at the very top of the stairs.

The clinic, with its steel sink and gleaming operating table, is empty. Tendrils of warm sandalwood incense dance through the air like souls, rising from a small shrine in a corner of the room. A pile of offerings—oranges, apples, and a small pineapple—lay heaped before a nuo opera mask, a lacquered ebony face twisted into a grimace, with flaming red brows and a tiger’s whiskers.

As I approach the shrine, incense crawls after me like a summer insect, creating a halo around my head, and I bat the smoke away with my hand. “Go away,” I say, although it’s just smoke.

Near the clinic’s window, a steaming kettle of black coffee rests on a low sandalwood table beside diagrams of musculature and anatomy. The window is wide open, silk curtains fluttering in the breeze.

I arrange my high heels neatly under the windowsill and climb outside, onto the rusted fire escape. Down below, a couple of gangsters look up, cigarettes between their teeth. I smooth my dress down to conceal my underwear.

Yue Liqing is standing on the roof, leaning over the parapet, wearing a flowing blouse made of patterned silk. A strand of her curled, white hair dances in the night air.

“Waipo!” I yell from the fire escape. “What are you doing?”

She holds her hand up to silence me. “Breathing,” she says. “Jingwen, don’t you feel like the night air is haunted sometimes? It’s beautiful.”

In the distance, nightclub signs twinkle like paper lanterns floating down a stream. Automobiles glide up the avenues like a school of goldfish. The fog I had noticed earlier that evening has lifted.

“Waipo, I brought the money.”

Liqing’s eyes open slowly. “You’re also late. You were caught up dancing with some new paramour, weren’t you? That’s why you’re wearing that ridiculous thing on your head. Your mother was exactly the same in her youth.”

I reach up and realize I’m still wearing the beaded headdress. “There was an attack at the cabaret.” I comb my fingers through the beads to untangle them from my hair. “Waipo, you always know everything that happens in Shanghai after nightfall. What’s going on?”

Liqing exhales one last time, the warmth of her breath lingering in the air, and she descends the fire escape, her surgeon’s hands steady on the rails. At odds with the rest of the urban decay, she is wearing black-and-white cloth slippers, a relic of her childhood in the countryside.

In her clinic, she pours a mug of coffee. We sit across from each other at the table, both of us kneeling. When the mug is nearly full, I reach for it, but Liqing slaps my hand away.

“The first cup is always for the spirits,” she responds, setting it between us.

I sigh audibly, but she ignores my exasperation. With a deep breath, I prepare to launch into a rant about Huahua and her missing lips, but I bite my tongue before I start. Liqing’s shoulders are relaxed, her eyes closed as she inhales the coffee steam. If I say anything now, she won’t hear it. So, I gesture to the shrine instead, trying to appease her obsession with ghosts and demons. “The mask is different from the one you had a few hours ago when I came for the bones.”

Liqing fills a second mug of coffee. “Ah yes, that mask was meant to ward off the spirits of my hateful, long-dead in-laws. This one is meant to repel the pig-faced ghost.”

The vines of smoke dance toward my outstretched finger, hissing like a viper, and I draw my hand away. Liqing nudges the coffee toward me, and I take it as my cue to start.

I suck in another deep breath. “Someone cut Huahua’s lips from her face. It happened like lightning. One second everyone was dancing, including her, and then she screamed and her lips were gone. I don’t know how to describe it—she wasn’t even bleeding that much. Her face became a sort of moving shadow.”

“That is gruesome,” Liqing agrees, “but hardly the strangest thing I’ve heard about this city.”

“Even now, I wonder if I imagined it. Maybe I’m just going mad.”

My beaded headdress lies discarded on the old carpet—crown jewels under the Paramount’s sparkling chandeliers, but cheap junk on the floor of my grandmother’s clinic.

The lines around Liqing’s mouth deepen. “Shanghai is a wild animal. Her cruelty lies in her capitalistic nature. If you choose to become a cabaret girl, then you should be prepared to deal with the consequences.”

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From Daughter of Calamity by Rosalie M. Lin. Copyright © 2024 by the author and reprinted by permission of St. Martin’s Publishing Group.

Struggling to understand what’s happening in the world today? Consider yesterday with Annalee Newitz, author of Four Lost Cities: A Secret History of the Urban Age and Scatter and The Terraformers. Newitz is back with Stories Are Weapons: Psychological Warfare and the American Mind, an incisive and timely exploration of propaganda, manipulation, and disinformation.

Stories Are Weapons traces America’s deep roots in weaponizing stories through media and influence campaigns to take a critical look at the battles around identity, including school boards and LGBTQ+ students, race, and feminism, dividing Americans now.

In this excerpt from the first chapter, find out how Freud’s nephew used what he learned from his uncle manipulate the media and topple a government (to popularize bananas in the United States!), and what Cold War psyops have in common with advertising campaigns.

Stories Are Weapons: Psychological Warfare and the American Mind is available June 4 wherever books are sold.

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The Mind Bomb

Modern psychological warfare began in the plush Vienna offices of an early twentieth-­century doctor named Sigmund Freud, who popularized a new scientific discipline called psychoanalysis. In his writing and lectures, Freud argued that psychoanalysis had identified “the unconscious,” a veiled part of the mind that motivates people even when they aren’t aware of it. For Freud, unconscious desires were the key to understanding why people developed mental health problems, or “neuroses,” as he liked to call them. With the help of a doctor like himself, trained in psychoanalysis, that desire could be made conscious and therefore controllable. He had some success with patients suffering from what therapists today would likely call depression and trauma. But many enthusiastic Freudians used his work in contexts that the doctor never intended, like advertising and wartime propaganda. No doubt he would have psychoanalyzed the hell out of these misappropriations, but he never got the chance. Freud died in 1939, shortly after Nazis drove him and his family out of Vienna.

Freud wanted to cure neuroses by helping people understand themselves—­especially the taboo desires hidden in their unconscious minds. His form of therapy involved asking patients about their dreams, early memories, and fantasies; it was his way of plumbing their unconscious minds, where desire can roam free. He called it the “talking cure.” Patients would narrate their own lives and analyze the arcane symbolism of their dreams, slowly piecing together all the events and feelings that had caused their troubles. Once the patient had a coherent story about themselves, Freud believed, they could work through whatever harmful thoughts or behaviors plagued them. If, however, they did not reengineer what Freud called the “mechanism” of their consciousness,¹ they were liable to be aggressive, depressed, self-­destructive, or delusional. It turned out this also made them easy targets for propaganda.

We know that because savvy advertising creatives in New York City conducted what amounted to mass psychological experiments in the 1920s, when they started using Freud’s ideas to sell products. The most prominent among them was Freud’s own nephew, Edward Bernays, often heralded as the creator of “public relations” as a field. Bernays grew up in New York City, though he spent summers with Freud’s family in the Alps—­the two families were close, perhaps because all the parents were related. Bernays’s mother was Freud’s sister, and Bernays’s father was the brother of Freud’s wife. In 1917, Bernays sent his uncle a box of the Havana cigars he loved, and the psychoanalyst returned the favor by sending his nephew a copy of his latest book, Introductory Lectures on Psycho-­Analysis. Though Freud’s previous books had made waves in the scientific community, this was his first mainstream hit. The short book popularized Freud’s conception of the unconscious and its connection to dreams. It also paved the way for Bernays’s own meditation on psychology in 1923 called Crystallizing Public Opinion, which was about how to persuade the public by using mass media like newspapers to appeal to their unconscious biases.

One of Bernays’s early career triumphs was an advertising campaign for Lucky Strike cigarettes in 1929, aimed specifically at young women. Smoking had long been considered a male habit, and it was generally taboo for women to smoke publicly. Bernays wanted to change all that and open up a new market for cigarettes. Freud had taught Bernays that the dream logic of the unconscious mind included a kind of emotional free association, where desire for one thing could easily morph into desire for something completely different—­at least, if the two desires could be made to intertwine somehow. His only question was, what did women want, and how could Bernays convert it into a hankering for cigarettes? Young women in America at that time were still electrified by the success of the suffrage movement and were excited to pursue the newfound freedoms that came with the voting rights they had secured in 1920. So Bernays decided to create a campaign that could sublimate women’s love of freedom into a lust for cigarettes. All he needed was the perfect mass media vehicle—­one that fed women’s dreams. He worked his connections and got in touch with Vogue magazine. Somehow he convinced the fashion magazine to give him a list of New York’s hottest debutantes so that he could invite them to a “Torches of Freedom” demonstration. He pitched it as an event where the city’s wealthiest young women would light up cigarettes at the annual Easter Day Parade, flaunting their liberation.

It was the perfect spectacle for the photo-­hungry media, and the campaign was a roaring success. Women whose emotions were roused by thoughts of “freedom”—­and by the sight of so many female influencers—­started buying cigarettes and smoking them openly. As psychologist Lisa Held puts it, “Bernays was duly convinced that linking products to emotions could cause people to behave irrationally. In reality, of course, women were no freer for having taken up smoking, but linking smoking to women’s rights fostered a feeling of independence.”² In the wake of Bernays’s success with the Lucky Strike campaign, advertisers began to study psychology to figure out ways to manipulate the unconscious minds of consumers. They would lure consumers in with emotional appeals or by associating a product with some political ideal like freedom.

Bernays’s work was strongly influenced by progressive journalist Walter Lippmann, founder of the New Republic magazine, who had worked in the US propaganda office during World War I.³ After his wartime experiences, Lippmann published a polemic called Public Opinion, in which he argued that democracy was being eroded by media manipulation and propaganda. Bernays’s book Crystallizing Public Opinion was a sardonic tip of the hat to Lippmann’s, whose ideas he cited while drawing the opposite conclusions. Bernays was thrilled by the power of media, and explained in step-­by-­step detail how intrepid public relations managers could use it effectively for advertising, corporate messaging, and political persuasion. Bernays described PR work as the “engineering of consent,” and called it a new form of free speech. He wrote, “Freedom of speech . . . and [the] free press have tacitly expanded our Bill of Rights to include the right of persuasion.”⁴

The truly creepy part? Bernays had successfully turned his uncle’s project to promote mental health into a system for manipulating people into behaving irrationally. Instead of helping people understand what they truly desired in their unconscious minds, he invited them to displace those desires onto something else, something they could buy. His Lucky Strike campaign channeled women’s hopes for freedom into nicotine addiction. But Bernays always wanted to go beyond selling cigarettes. He believed that public relations campaigns could be done for countries just as easily as for corporations. Roughly twenty years after he got feminists hooked on smoking, Bernays used his media-­manipulation skills to topple a nation’s government.

Freud, again, provided an inspiration for Bernays’s foray into international politics. In 1921, the psychoanalyst published a monograph called Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, in which he suggested that humans had a “herd instinct” and could easily be led into irrational behavior by influencers. Though Freud imagined those influencers to be patriarchs—­fathers, heads of state, religious leaders—­Bernays realized that they could be anyone, from a debutante to a grubby newspaperman. Freud thought that the herd mentality was dangerous and could lead to political catastrophe. Lippmann, who feared its power over the free press, agreed. But Bernays embraced it.

At the dawn of the Cold War, Bernays was hired to run a campaign for United Fruit to popularize bananas in the United States. Most were from Guatemala, where the government allowed United Fruit (now Chiquita) to own 42 percent of the country’s land, where it grew crops on vast plantations without paying local taxes. Bernays’s plans to make bananas the number one American snack hit a snag when Guatemalans elected Jacobo Árbenz Guzmán (known popularly as Árbenz), a reformer who wanted to stop colonial-­style exploitation, in 1951. Árbenz began to confiscate uncultivated plantation lands, including 210,000 acres belonging to United Fruit. He divided the plantations up into one hundred thousand plots and handed them over to impoverished Guatemalans. Árbenz also demanded higher wages for agricultural laborers. Bernays was outraged. His campaign to gin up demand for bananas was reaching a fever pitch, but his client was losing both land and money. While the United Fruit PR team continued to regale Americans with stories about the wonders of bananas, Bernays worked with the CIA to get his clients’ plantations back.

Using his business connections, Bernays activated a network of spies in Guatemala to get intel on Árbenz’s background and any connections he might have to the Soviet Union. According to Larry Tye, author of The Father of Spin: Edward L. Bernays and the Birth of Public Relations, Bernays claimed that a trustworthy source had told him that Guatemalan “Reds” were using weapons supplied by the Soviet embassy in Mexico City. He leaked intel like this to carefully selected journalists and soon the papers were full of rumors about Guatemalan communists plotting to take over the country. Colleagues in the United Fruit PR department found Bernays’s tactics distasteful. Tye writes, “Thomas McCann, who in the 1950s was a young public relations official with United Fruit, wrote in his memoir that ‘what the press would hear and see was carefully staged and regulated by the host. The plan represented a serious attempt to compromise objectivity.’ ” Still, Bernays’s plot worked: thanks in large part to what he called a “scientific approach” to “counter-­Communist propaganda,” many people in the United States came to believe that Guatemala was a threat. Few journalists questioned why a small group of anti-­Árbenz forces was able to stage a coup in 1954, overthrow Guatemala’s democratically elected government, and hand thousands of small Guatemalan-­owned farms back to United Fruit. In 1997, declassified documents revealed that the CIA had aided the men behind the coup with training and supplies—­and their black ops were justified by stories about a communist threat, spread by a PR guy who wanted to sell bananas.⁵

To understand how psychological warfare developed in the United States, we need to keep in mind the bloody tale of Bernays and his banana propaganda.

The Bible of Psywar

When Paul Linebarger was writing Psychological Warfare for the US Army in the late 1940s, he was operating in the world that Bernays and Madison Avenue had made. Equally important, he benefited from a push within the Army to establish what became known as the Office of Psychological Warfare, headed by Brigadier General Robert McClure.⁶ Before 1951, the military had had no ongoing units devoted exclusively to psyops—­generally psywar units were brought together temporarily during periods of war, drawing personnel from different groups devoted to irregular warfare or information management. But as the Korean War heated up, Army leadership determined that these disparate efforts should be unified under McClure—­and that psywar units would no longer be disbanded during peacetime.

Unlike McClure, Linebarger does not usually appear front and center in histories of Cold War psyops, and he preferred it that way. He was an academic and operative who worked behind the scenes, as much an observer of psywar as a practitioner of it. Perhaps that’s why he was in the perfect position to write Psychological Warfare. It was one of the first military handbooks to codify a number of ad hoc practices for controlling large masses of people in order to win a war, using public relations and mass media. The book, originally a classified pamphlet made available to select Army personnel in 1948, became the first teaching manual for people working within McClure’s newly organized psywar units. The influence of Linebarger’s book during the Cold War spread outward from the Army and into the intelligence community at large. Journalist Scott Anderson, author of The Quiet Americans: Four CIA Spies at the Dawn of the Cold War,⁷ describes how much the book meant to a young CIA agent named Rufus Phillips III. Phillips had joined a dozen other operatives for a new initiative described by their commander, Edward Lansdale, as “whatever we can do to save South Vietnam.” It was 1954, and they had no idea what to do. But then Lansdale handed Phillips a copy of Linebarger’s Psychological Warfare, which Phillips called the “bible on the topic.” Reading that book was his only training. Within weeks, Phillips was designing crash courses in psyops for the South Vietnamese military.

Thanks in part to Linebarger’s work, Cold War psyops came to resemble an advertising campaign backed up by violence. It was an approach he had first seen implemented during World War II. “The war we have just won was a peculiar kind of advertising campaign, designed to make the Germans and Japanese like us and our way of doing things,” he wrote in Psychological Warfare. “They did not like us much, but we gave them alternatives far worse than liking us, so that they became peaceful.”⁸ Those “alternatives” included what his contemporaries called simply the Bomb.

The Bomb was the kinetic weapon that shaped the Cold War mindset. Everyone from American schoolkids to Soviet nuclear scientists had witnessed atomic bombs obliterating Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and now humanity was living with the reality of a weapon that had never existed before: one that could actually wipe out our species. The world’s greatest nuclear powers, the United States and the Soviet Union, needed sneaky ways to attack each other without directly declaring a war that could cost them everything. Psyops were one way to do it. During this period, both nations established military and intelligence bureaucracies that waged an icy battle of ideologies. Their episodes of brinkmanship exploded into violence during the Korean War, the Vietnam War, and many other proxy battles throughout the world. But the superpowers’ attacks on each other were counterbalanced by a profound fear of nuclear war. Cold War psychological warriors used that fear the way atomic weapons manufacturers used uranium.

Linebarger’s work depended on the idea that psyops campaigns would always be overshadowed by the threat of nuclear annihilation. Directly after the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as the horrors of those attacks were still unfolding, he worked with the US Army to create one of the most important influence campaigns of the war: the United States leaked the Japanese government’s offer of surrender while the terms were still being negotiated. Linebarger described how the operation went down:

The Japanese government pondered [the conditions of surrender], but while it pondered, B-­29s carried leaflets to all parts of Japan, giving the text of the Japanese official offer to surrender. This act alone would have made it almost impossibly difficult for the Japanese government to whip its people back into frenzy for suicidal prolongation of war.⁹

Linebarger believed this campaign worked partly because “so many people [were] being given so decisive a message, all at the same time.” The mass dissemination of the message was as important as the message itself. To sway public opinion, US psywarriors needed the Japanese masses to understand that a surrender was in the works before the government could walk it back. As Linebarger wrote, the United States won largely because they “got in the last word.”

Linebarger added his own peculiar expertise to the mix of psychology and public relations that defined twentieth-­century propaganda. In his secret life as Cordwainer Smith, he was publishing some of the most acclaimed science fiction stories of the 1950s and ’60s. He was brilliant at building imaginary worlds that felt so real that some of his readers were convinced the secretive author was a covert agent from a distant future. Literary critic Gary Wolfe, who has written extensively about Linebarger’s fiction, told me that “so much is unexplained [in Smith’s stories] that readers assumed the writer had forgotten to fill in background because he knew it to be true. People thought he was an actual time traveler.”¹⁰ It turned out to be the perfect skill for a propagandist.

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Excerpted from Stories Are Weapons: Psychological Warfare and the American Mind. Copyright (c) 2024 by Annalee Newitz. Used with permission of the publisher, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. All rights reserved.