After long generations of peace, a nostalgia for war has come to Muspell's Planet. And so, some carnage is to be staged as 'entertainment' - using entire planets as backdrops and populations as expendable extras. The computers planning this spectacle are ingenious. They have peopled one planet with genetically-engineered replicas of the ancient Norse gods and another with a vast army of Richard III's troops. Will old-fashioned human courage in battle win? Or will the Norse tricksters use their greater power to make up for their smaller numbers? The computers and the massed spectators wait eagerly to find out. But one question remains - what will happen when the engineered cannon fodder learns that every man, woman and child of them has been created only to be slaughtered for amusement? Cover art by James Warhola.