It Happened on
December 6, 1983
There are two kinds of people—those who think there are two kinds of people and those who don’t
From the beginning of Time, Man has been on the move, ever outward. First he spread over his own planet, then across the Solar System, then outward to the Galaxies, all of them dotted, speckled, measled with the colonies of Man.
Then, one day in the year eleven thousand four hundred and six (11,406), an incredible discovery was made in the Master Imperial Computer back on Earth. Nearly 500 years before, a clerical error had erased from the computer’s memory more than… (see gallery of images for the story, as published in Playboy Magazine of December 1982)
Don’t You Know There’s a War On? is a sharp satirical science-fiction story in which Donald E. Westlake imagines a far-future human empire spread across the galaxy—only to discover, through a bureaucratic error, that an enormous interstellar war has been raging without the central authorities even realizing it. The story skewers blind faith in computers, institutional complacency, and the absurd consequences of administrative mistakes. True to Westlake’s style, the tone blends cosmic scale with dry, almost cruel humor: trillions of lives hinge not on strategy or heroism, but on a forgotten data entry.
Donald E. Westlake (1933–2008) was one of America’s greatest comic crime and satire writers, equally revered in mystery and science fiction. He wrote under his own name and many pseudonyms (most famously Richard Stark, creator of the ruthless Parker crime series). Westlake’s genius lay in exposing the machinery of systems—crime syndicates, corporations, governments, and bureaucracies—and revealing how easily they collapse into farce. His science fiction, like this story, often applied the same ruthless logic to futuristic empires, proving that no matter how advanced the technology, human error and institutional stupidity remain undefeated constants.
