Lieutenant Mitch Laskell commands a one-man submarine built for silent patrol and precise destruction. Alone in the Atlantic, he hears the announcement that his nation has placed absolute wartime power in the hands of a single military authority—and that the next step may be a radiological assault capable of poisoning entire continents.
Most sailors would accept the order and return to base. Laskell does not.
Instead, he cuts his communications and turns away from the war. His small submarine becomes a fugitive vessel racing through the night, carrying one man who suddenly refuses to help tear down the industrial world that humanity spent centuries building.
But rebellion at sea is not as simple as running away. Alone with only a navigation computer to question and the endless ocean for company, Laskell struggles to understand why he turned his back on orders that every other officer would obey. Is he thinking clearly, or has something inside him broken?
Then new contacts appear on the radar—enemy submarines moving toward the American coast.
The war he rejected has found him again, and now the rebel must decide whether walking away from the fight was the right choice after all.
Walter M. Miller Jr. wrote only a small number of science fiction stories during the 1950s, but several became enduring classics. His work appeared in magazines such as Astounding Science Fiction, Galaxy Science Fiction, and The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. Miller later expanded his celebrated novella “The Darfsteller” and other shorter works into a lasting reputation among science fiction readers, but his greatest achievement came with the novel A Canticle for Leibowitz (1959), a landmark story about civilization rebuilding after nuclear catastrophe. “Way of a Rebel” reflects the same concern with technological civilization and the danger of destroying it through war.
