Military science fiction: Difference between revisions

Military science fiction is a subgenre of science fiction that features the use of science fiction technology, mainly weapons, for military purposes and usually principal characters who are members of a military organization involved in military activity, usually during a war; occurring sometimes in outer space or on a different planet or planets. It exists in literature, comics, film, and video games.

A detailed description of the conflict, the tactics and weapons used for it, and the role of a military service and the individual members of that military organization form the basis for a typical work of military science fiction. The stories often use features of actual past or current Earth conflicts, with countries being replaced by planets or galaxies of similar characteristics, battleships replaced by space battleships, and certain events changed so the author can extrapolate what might have occurred.

Characteristics

Main articles: Science fictional space warfare, Interstellar war, and Galactic empire

Traditional military values of bravery, sacrifice, sense of duty, and camaraderie are emphasized, and the action is usually described from the point of view of a soldier in often space war science fiction setting. Typically, the technology is more advanced than that of the present and described in detail. In some stories, however, technology is fairly static, and weapons that would be familiar to present-day soldiers are used, but other aspects of society have changed. For example, women may be accepted as equal partners for combat roles. In many military science fiction stories, technological advances are often basic to plot developments. Some works draw heavy parallels to human history and the fact that scientific breakthroughs or new doctrine can severely change the outcome of battles and the way war is fought. Many works explore how progress or changes to the aforementioned affect military doctrine and also how the protagonists and antagonists reflect on and adapt to these changes. Military science fiction is also part of the "military and popular culture" subject field.

Many authors have either used a galaxy-spanning fictional empire as background or written about the growth and/or decline of such an empire. The capital of a galactic empire is frequently a core world, such as a planet relatively close to a galaxy's supermassive black hole, which has advanced considerably in science and technology compared to current human civilization. Characterizations can vary wildly from malevolent forces attacking sympathetic victims to apathetic bureaucracies to more reasonable entities focused on social progress and anywhere in between. Sci-fi writers generally posit some form of faster-than-light drive in order to facilitate interstellar war. Writers such as Larry Niven have developed plausible interplanetary conflict based on human colonization of the asteroid belt and outer planets by means of technologies utilizing the laws of physics as currently understood.

Definitions by contrast

Main articles: space opera and Space Western

Several subsets of military science fiction overlap with space opera, concentrating on large-scale space battles with futuristic weapons in an interstellar war. Many series can be considered to belong and fall in two genres or even overlap all like The Sten Chronicles by Allan Cole and Chris Bunch, Ender's Game series by Orson Scott Card, Honorverse by David Weber and Deathstalker by Simon R. Green. At one extreme, the genre is used to speculate about future wars involving space travel, or the effects of such a war on humans; at the other, it consists of the use of military fiction plots with some superficial science-fiction trappings. The term "military space opera" is occasionally used to denote this subgenre, as used for example by critic Sylvia Kelso when describing Lois McMaster Bujold's Vorkosigan Saga. Another example of military space opera would be the Battlestar Galactica franchise and Robert A. Heinlein's 1959 novel Starship Troopers. The key distinction of military science fiction from space opera as part of the fictional space warfare is that the principal characters in a space opera are not military personnel, but civilians or paramilitary. That which brings them together under a common denominator is that military science fiction like space opera often concerns an interstellar war. Military science fiction however does not necessarily always include an outer space or multi-planetary setting like space opera and space Western.

Other aspects of military science fiction overlap with the sub-genre Space Western that often consider and view the interstellar war and oppression of galactic empire as backdrop with focus on lone gunslinger in vast space with raygun with fantastic fictional technologies in a futuristic space Frontier setting. These Western themes may be explicit, such as cowboys in outer space, or they can be a more subtle influence in space opera. Gene Roddenberry described Star Trek: The Original Series as a Space Western (or more poetically, as "Wagon Train to the stars"). Firefly and its cinematic follow-up Serenity literalized the Western aspects of the genre popularized by Star Trek: it used frontier towns, horses, and the styling of classic John Ford Westerns. Worlds that have been terraformed may be depicted as presenting similar challenges as that of a frontier settlement in a classic Western. Six-shooters and horses may be replaced by ray guns and rockets.

History

A 1922 illustration, drawn by illustrator Frank R. Paul, of inventor Nikola Tesla's speculative vision of what war will be like in the future, as described by him.

Precursors for military science fiction can be found in "future war" stories dating back at least to George Chesney's story "The Battle of Dorking" (1871). Other works of fiction followed, including H.G. Wells's "The Land Ironclads". Eventually, as science fiction became an established and separate genre, military science fiction established itself as a subgenre. One such work is H. Beam Piper's Uller Uprising (1952) (based on the events of the Sepoy Mutiny). Robert A. Heinlein's Starship Troopers (1959) is another work of military science fiction, along with Gordon Dickson's Dorsai (1960), and these are thought to be mostly responsible for popularizing this subgenre's popularity among young readers of the time.

The Vietnam War resulted in veterans with combat experience deciding to write science fiction, including Joe Haldeman and David Drake. Throughout the 1970s, works such as Haldeman's The Forever War and Drake's Hammer's Slammers helped increase the popularity of the genre. Short stories also were popular, collected in books such as Combat SF, edited by Gordon R. Dickson. This anthology includes one of the first Hammer's Slammers stories, as well as one of the BOLO stories by Keith Laumer and one of the Berserker stories by Fred Saberhagen. This anthology seems to have been the first time these stories specifically dealing with war as a subject were collected and marketed as such. The series of anthologies with the group title There Will be War edited by Pournelle and John F. Carr (nine volumes from 1983 through 1990) helped keep the category active, and encouraged new writers to add to it.

A special twist was introduced in Harry Turtledove's Worldwar series depicting an alternate history in which WWII is disrupted by extraterrestrials invading Earth in 1942, forcing humans to stop fighting each other and unite against this common enemy. Turtledove depicts the tactics and strategy of this new course of the war in great detail, showing how American, British, Soviet, and German soldiers and Jewish guerrillas (some of them historical figures) deal with this extraordinary new situation, as well as providing a not unsympathetic detailed point of view of individual invader warriors. In the war situation posited by Turtledove, the invaders have superior arms, but the gap is not too wide for the humans to bridge. For example, the invaders have more advanced tanks, but the German Wehrmacht's tank crews facing them - a major theme in the series - are more skilled and far more experienced.

Viewpoints

Several authors have presented stories with political messages of varying types as major or minor themes of their works.

David Drake has often written of the horrors and futility of war. He has said, in the afterwords of several of his Hammer's Slammers books (1979 and later), that one of his reasons for writing is to educate those people who have not experienced war, but who might have to make the decision to start or endorse a war (as policymakers or as voters) about what war is really like, and what the powers and limits of the military as an instrument of policy are.

David Weber has said:

For me, military science fiction is science fiction which is written about a military situation with a fundamental understanding of how military lifestyles and characters differ from civilian lifestyles and characters. It is science fiction which attempts to realistically portray the military within a science-fiction context. It is not 'bug shoots'. It is about human beings, and members of other species, caught up in warfare and carnage. It isn't an excuse for simplistic solutions to problems.

See also

• List of military science fiction works and authors
• Science fictional space warfare
• Weapons in science fiction
• War novel