If the absurd war-pageantry of Moderan’s stronghold warlords—dueling for status in their Newmetal bodies while keeping "coldpack" wives on ice—made you grin and wince, you’ll love the deadpan bite of Cat’s Cradle. Vonnegut’s ice-nine turns the end of the world into a joke so sharp it cuts, and the invented faith of Bokononism skewers the same hollow comforts and rituals that Moderan’s War Men cling to.

Moderan’s ritualized raids and body-as-armor ethos feel like nightmares told in steel and plastic; Ballard pushes that dream-logic further. In The Atrocity Exhibition, scenes splice together war imagery, celebrity, and machine-altered flesh into disorienting tableaux that echo Moderan’s surreal stronghold braggadocio—only here the battlefield is the psyche itself.

If you liked how Moderan unfolds in sharp, self-contained episodes—Stronghold-10 boasting through one absurd escapade after another—The Cyberiad offers a kindred pleasure. Trurl and Klapaucius hop from one ingenious, comic parable to the next, each tale tweaking power, pride, and invention with the same caustic wit that runs through Moderan’s miniatures.

Moderan’s plastified earth and endless make-war show a civilization that broke itself and kept marching; Riddley Walker peers into the rubble after the marching stops. Through Riddley’s broken, reinvented English and the twisted Punch-and-Judy myth, you’ll find the same grim recognition that ritual and violence linger long after the machines, much like Moderan’s ceremonial raids.

If you laughed darkly at Moderan’s pomp—War Men preening in Newmetal while clinging to empty codes—A Canticle for Leibowitz delivers that gallows chuckle in a monastery safeguarding the detritus of our age. From monks venerating a shopping list to cycles of rediscovered destruction, it mines the same bleakly comic vein of human folly you tasted in Moderan.