We just saw a perfect test case for TASAT - the Israeli ‘pager trap’ sprung on Hezbollah. Can you cite one or more past scifi tales in which a ‘great deal’ later turns out to have been arranged and pre-sabotaged by an adversary?
E.g., in THE UPLIFT WAR, an Earth colony (Garth) bought a fiber optic factory from the Gubru at a fine price – and the invaders later used suborned cables to track down every human. It’s called a honeypot. Past SF tales can take it in many directions. Citing these (ideally with source info) might even be useful to the Protector Caste today!
Philip K Dick’s War Game (War Game (short story) - Wikipedia ) in which a children’s game spreads a meme that will weaken Earth’s society.
Two from Asimov: Bridle and Saddle, in which the rulers of Anacreon accept Foundation technology and the religon that goes with it because it gives them power over the masses, but which really gives Foundation power over them.
The Merchant Princes in which trade with the Foundation also gives advantages - but also creates dependence.
In A Matter For Men, the US accepts a treaty requiring the US to supply power and military supplies to other nations - but hidden features exist.
It’s a story within a story but the operation immediately reminded me of the Kassad chapter in Hyperion.
He tells his fellow travellers of a guerilla uprising on a Hegemony controlled planet and his brutal a s surgical measures to end it.
He uses comlinks that all Hegemony citizens possess to target and simultaneously kill all enemy commanders. In the book it was timed during a planet-wide broadcast.
"As a result, the United States was required to greatly weaken its armed forces, to comply with new bans on certain weapon systems, to make official statements of culpability for warmongering, and to undertake new programs of civic education for the young that were supposed to establish precautions against the possibility of Americans making choices to start future wars. Also, the United States was made to pay heavy reparations to the international community. America’s network of allies continues to realign and break apart. Other countries continue to become more hostile, even though it is not always in a military sense of hostility.
U.S. leaders respond by stimulating the domestic economy with large investments in new technologies. Secondly, the U.S. manages to surreptitiously re-structure the reparations required under the Millennium Treaties. The new US national security strategy is subtle, and has a focus on making other countries more reliant on the United States. This was done through applying economic diplomacy, sharp power, soft power, and other measures to increase foreign dependency on a variety of assets and systems controlled or heavily influenced by America. These include America’s new generations of advanced robotic systems, American space-based solar power technologies, American food exports, American space transportation systems such as spaceplanes, and newly expanded efforts by agencies such as the Peace Corps and USAID.
In great secrecy, the American government continues work on advanced military technologies, dual-use technologies, and finding means to leverage the revolution in military affairs to gain advantage in this radically new geopolitical situation. The books give attention to such things as high-energy microwave weapons, cyberwarfare, military teleoperation, and intelligent agents that can be militarized. All these efforts are forbidden under the Millennium Treaties"
The beloved Star Trek: The Next Generation episode The Game has Riker introduced by a Ktarian woman to a wearable holographic game in which the player mentally maneuvers floating discs into wiggly tubes.
Quickly the whole crew of the Enterprise is entranced by the game, which they are strongly compelled to distribute to others. It is later discovered to be highly addictive and to manipulate the wearer into a suggestible state, submitting to the will of the Ktarians.
The ‘honeypot’ has other examples in real life, one classic being ‘Operation Mincemeat’ of WWII. False information about Allied invasion plans for Southern Europe were planted on a dead courier and allowed to wash up on the Spanish coast, where the Germans could get their hands on it.
SF examples of subverting the opposition infrastructure:
Babylon 5: In the Season 4 ep ‘Endgame’, Capt Sheridan arranges to have ships of the opposing Earth Fleet disabled by telepaths smuggled aboard in supplies. (Sounds a bit lame put like that. The setup is complicated, with moral implications, and is covered over several episodes.)
George Martin’s “Beast for Norn” (Tuf Voyaging) describes how the protagonist, with access to a wide variety of alien species, deals with various noble houses of a planet for the most magnificent fighting beasts. He effectively ends the practice by including a small group of prey animals with each deal. The prey species breed far faster than the predators can, and beggar the resources of each house.
In the title story of Chris Lawson’s “Written in Blood” anthology, muslims who have taken to the practice of embedding the text of the Quran into their DNA as an expression of faith are faced with the dilemma of having provided their enemies with an attack vector for viruses.
A short story I read as a child called “Fred” by Catherine Gleason contains two instances of this. There was an Earth/Venus war, which Earth won. Earth uses robots for labour, Venus uses enslaved Venusians. A few million Venusians now live on Earth. The Venusians only need to breath every few minutes, so keep a bag of their atmospheric gases around their neck. Then:
The Venusians have infiltrated the robot manufacture and control industry and secretly modified the robots. They activate modified circuits in the robots, and start a revolution using the robots to control the Earthlings.
Fortunately, the World Government had already snuck a failsafe into the gas bags all Venusians carry, so activate it, and now the Venusians cannot breath. The revolution is soon over.
The Doctor Who plot about the Sontarans getting ATMOS devices installed into all vehicles; with the alleged intent to improve the atmosphere, but the actual hidden intent to convert Earth to a Sontaran Hatchery world.
Vernor Vinge’s A Deepness in the Sky features a very long term honeypot stratagem: one of the conquered Qeng Ho turns over one of that organization’s most valuable tools, a distributed computing and observation network that can monitor everyone via dustlike particles. But the “localizers” have a deeper layer of utility, allowing subtle manipulation of the data and other tricks
Actually an even better Vernor Vinge example, directly analogous to the way Israel apparently infiltrated the supply chain for Hezbollah, is in “Marooned in Realtime” - the villain built up a company to supply survival gear of all sorts, and developed a sterling reputation, so that when a contract came in to supply a group’s trip to the far-distant future, he could supply equipment that would fail (giving him the opportunity to take over the group with his still-working equipment).
Murray Leinster’s novella The Greks Bring Gifts (1964) comes to mind.
Can’t put my hands on my copy at the moment to refresh my memory, but Greks arrive at Earth offer fantastic technology to humanity – because they are just really good aliens wanting the best for everyone. War, poverty, plague…all removed, replaced by plenty for everyone. The Greks wait as dependence on the tech sets in over generations, undermining the economies, manufacturing and science humanity had possessed, such as it was. Then the technology stops working and the Greks step in and take control.
Sounds like Clarke’s Childhood’s End, except the path taken was to extract the essence and shepherd an ‘uplift’. Leinster’s Greks were there to exploit, more like self-serving Ferengi than Clarke’s Overlords serving the Overmind.
drifting slightly off-topic…1950s AI as predictor of GPT:
Clifford Simak “So Bright the Vision” (1956) short story about Earth finding a niche in galactic society writing fiction for aliens using writing machines called “yarners”;
“…by and large Earth today is principally devoted to the production of a solid stream of fiction for the alien trade … we happen to be the galaxy’s only liars…” p109
Thanks doc, pretty (80%) sure it was Asimov (rip) who wrote ‘let’s get together’
Post Trinity written story, bunch of (robotic?) ambassadors (?) each with a fraction more than 1/nth of critical mass …
Asimov’s short story Let’s Get Together (1957) imagines the Cold War continuing for a century. A secret agent reports that Russia has sent ten humanoid robots to infiltrate America, each carrying an element to reassemble as a massive bomb.
My first thought was from Joe Haldeman’s Marsbound where there is mention of a terrorist group using a two component poison, introduced into the Israeli population, that is somehow triggered (like the Hezbolah pagers) to produce nation-level mass casualties.
Welcome, @Dwibdwib! Is that a major plot element, or an in-world historical aside? The little bit that I’ve turned up about Marsbound describes a story involving humans, Martians, and Others.