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Military Science-Fiction and the politics thereof

 
  

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Axolotl
18:36 / 23.08.06
Military Science Fiction is a field that I have perversely found myself reading more and more of. However while I’m generally reading them as cheap escapism I’ve found myself increasingly guilty about reading this stuff due to the politics often expressed therein. So I thought I’d start a thread on it and see if any one else read the stuff or had any thoughts on it.
I’ll start by defining the field: as the name suggests it’s science fiction that focuses on future wars and the future military, generally focussing on characters within the military chain of command and detailed descriptions of the conflict, strategies and tactics.
I guess the grand-daddy of all military sci-fi has got to be Heinlein’s Starship Troopers and for better or worse a lot of the genre is clearly influenced by it. Starting from there you have an increasing number of people writing this stuff and having an increasing presence on the shelves. Contemporary authors include people like David Drake, Jerry Pournelle, S. M. Stirling, and perhaps most successfully David Weber who pastiches the Hornblower series to great effect in his Honor Harrington series.
All of the above authors are in my opinion successful at writing exciting page-turners, with deft plotting and decent characterisation. So what’s my problem with them then?
Throughout the genre there seems to be some very dodgy politics going on. While I can live with the glorification of the military and violence on the basis that in most fiction you want your protagonists to be sympathetic, I can’t really condone is the number of books in the genre that seem to be anti-democracy and extremely right wing, sometimes even verging on fascist. For example Tom Kratman's and John Ringo's Watch on the Rhine where the heroes are a bunch of SS troops bought back to life to fight an alien invasion, and no, I’m not kidding. While this is an extreme example (and one I personally have not wasted my time or money on) many of them seem extremely disparaging towards the vast majority of civilians, especially those on the dole for some reason, see Weber and Pournelle for examples of this. They also pour huge amounts of scorn on the idea of the civilian politicians “interfering” in the military.
There are of course exceptions to this, Haldeman’s Forever War is a direct attack on militarism and Starship Troopers in particular. Weber, though his work starts off fairly one dimensional, soon introduces elements that point out the futility of war. Other military sci-fi is extremely good at dealing with the horrors of war, and while it may glorify the “poor bloody infantry”, doesn’t shy away from the brutality and ultimate pointlessness of war.
Does anyone else on Barbelith read any of this stuff and do they have any opinions on this? Can anyone recommend any good authors in the field or at least any less politically suspect ones?
Does military science fiction deal with important issues about the horrors of war and the morality of those who carry it out? Or is it merely pornography of violence written (and read?) by a bunch of right wing fruit loops, who can only sneak their views out in sci-fi as mainstream fiction wouldn’t touch it with a 10 foot barge pole?
Have I just spent half an hour typing this post only for it to sink without reply?
If any one is interested in checking out this stuff for free may I suggest the Baen free library here where some of the authors above have freely available books for downloading.
 
 
All Acting Regiment
19:15 / 23.08.06
Is my liking for military sci-fi justifiable, or have I been seduced by the dark side and it's glorification of violence and the military?

Oh, I don't think reading shitty books will neccesarily turn you into a shithead, and I certainly wouldn't want to proscribe certain books just because they're part of a generally dodgy genre or are problematic in other ways- I don't, for example, share what seems (to my under-educated eyes) to be Dante's world view, but I still enjoy the Inferno. You seem to be critical enough of these books and capable of spotting ideology and so on, otherwise you wouldn't have started this thread.

Apart from that, are any of these authors actually, you know, fascists, in a way that exists outside of their sad little heads? Are they involved in unpleasant activities that sales of their books might be funding? If so, you should probably buy the things second hand or steal them.

Also, I don't know what or how much else you read. Like I say, I don't think reading these books will turn you into a wingnut- but you'd probably have more fun reading a wider range of stuff. I'm not big on sci-fi, but I'm sure there's other 'lithers who could reccomend reads violent but decent.
 
 
Axolotl
19:43 / 23.08.06
I wasn't really worried about my own head-space but I am one of those people who'd rather not support an author who's propagating a nasty message, even if it is just by buying their stuff second hand (which my finances dictate anyway).
I also didn't mean to imply this was all I read, they're chewing gum, not chocolate - excuse the tip of the head to Annie there.
I guess I should have expressed myself better, but the post was meant to spark more general criticism (in the sense of analysis, not just finding fault) of the sub-genre rahter than just being about any putative effects reading the stuff might have on me.
 
 
Happy Dave Has Left
21:54 / 23.08.06
I think there's several things that need to be examined in this thread. I would contest the view that a science fiction book that features right-wing, militaristic societies, a disdain for the non-military civilian characters and/or outright genocide is necessarily a reflection of the writer's politics. This is fiction we're talking about. Obviously there are exceptions - Heinlein was known for his views on soldiering and personal sacrifice as a pre-requisite for participation in society. But writing about wars with aliens, brutal conflict, racial genocide and all of the other horrific things that any imagining of future war engenders does not a right-wing wingnut make.

As an example, I'd put forward John Scalzi, an American author who has had great success with his military SF. Scalzi is very definitely not Heinleinian in his politics, as evidenced in his prolific non-fiction and blogging, but humanity in his series of books is engaged in a bitter fight to the death with half the galaxy.

Now, for sure, military SF is a broad church, and some of the stuff that passes for it is one-step up from a Commando comic, except with spaceships and lasers instead of Spitfires and Lewis Guns. It's all jutting jaws and gritty resolve, and it is, frankly, pulp, without a whit of engagement with the wider issues raised by considering the spectre of war and the shapes it will take in the future.

I think that military SF, far from being the 'guilty pleasure' that you are feeling intellectual dishonesty and, if I'm reading your post correctly, shame about reading, is actually critical in the dialogue of science fiction as a whole. Whether we like it or not, conflict has always been present in human history, and only the insanely optimistic truly believe it will not be present in some form in our future. Discussing, theorising and writing fiction about this doesn't constitute some kind of amoral titillation, it exemplifies the inherent duality of science fiction, in that it simultaneously allows us to think about the future by holding a mirror up to our present. Remembering, understanding and writing about the dark side of the human condition is one of the ways we will avoid repeating its worst excesses.

There's actually a great recording of a discussion about Military SF featuring Scalzi here - all references to war were changed to 'tea' because of the uber-sensitive hotel staff in the reception area the discussion was held in. It's a good listen.
 
 
grant
00:53 / 24.08.06
I haven't read it, but I can't picture a novel about resurrecting SS troops to fight aliens that's not somehow asking the same questions you're asking here. I mean, if there's a shorthand for morally reprehensible militarism in pulp fiction, it's gotta be Nazis.
 
 
Happy Dave Has Left
07:09 / 24.08.06
I'll say again, I'm very concerned by the language and attitudes that this discussion is being couched in, as I'm percieving them to be largely unexamined. First, the topic abstract:

Is my liking for military sci-fi justifiable, or have I been seduced by the dark side and its glorification of violence and the military?

Justifiable to whom? Yourself? Your acquaintances? An anti-war protester who sees you reading military SF on the bus? Other Barbelithers? Your own sense of moral rectitude? I'd be interested as why you think you have to justify reading a particular type of fiction, to anyone.

There's also an unstated assumption here that military SF by it's very nature 'glorifies violence and the military'. Says who? If we take All Quiet on the Western Front and the themes presented therein, and set it on Mars, is that glorifying violence?

Second, your definition:
science fiction that focuses on future wars and the future military, generally focussing on characters within the military chain of command and detailed descriptions of the conflict, strategies and tactics.

Any space opera written in the last fifty years meets those criteria - that's an incredibly broad swathe of fiction. I have a feeling you are focusing the majority of your attention on the kind of mass-market barely-SF novels that Forbidden Planet in London helpfully shelves under 'Men with Guns and Girls' (no kidding). These books are, frankly, badly written, with horrendous production values and cover art straight out of the 1950s. They are echoed in the militaristic game-based novels that come out of the wargaming world. And they are most definitely where the Nazis in Spaaaaaaaaaace genre comes from. We can all agree, I think, that those books represent masochistic, obsessive wish fulfilment for some very suspect ideology at worst, and a poor taste gedankenexperiment at best.

But for me, that's not an issue here. You have represented those books as the real extreme ends of the spectrum, and said that you don't read them. So why are they being used to frame the debate?

Now, as for the Drakes, Webers and Pournelles of this world, and their 'dodgy ideology' - I take issue with the idea that it's possible to deduce an author's ideology solely from his written works. If you have access to hir private bank records so you can track any political donations, biographical works and ephemera from ze's life to confirm the kind of person ze was, then yes, you can probably make a valid assumption about who they were as a person. Anything otherwise is reading between the lines.

I'm interested that there's also an assumption that 'mainstream fiction' wouldn't 'touch this ideology with a 10ft pole'. As evidence, I give you Jack Reacher, avidly discussed in this thread. Do we assume that Lee Child is a fascist? No? Well, why not? Reacher is the definition of a 'man's man'. He's an ubermensch come to life, despising those weaker than him, cutting a swathe through the bad to save the good. He beats people to a bloody pulp regularly. So, what's the diff between Jack Reacher and the toned and rippling muscles of the 3rd Alpha Centauri Light Infantry? None that I can see.

I'm also disappointed that the other responses in this thread amount to little more than 'don't worry Mr Liberal 'Lither, reading trashy militaristic SF doesn't make you a crazy right-winger that we we won't associate with.' Legba makes the point that he enjoys the work of Dante, but doesn't share his views. Fine, fair point.

But I take massive issue with this statement:
Apart from that, are any of these authors actually, you know, fascists, in a way that exists outside of their sad little heads? Are they involved in unpleasant activities that sales of their books might be funding? If so, you should probably buy the things second hand or steal them.

Woah there. I think there's an unexamined assumption here. It's fiction. They make it up. Or are we assuming that they have latent racist, authoritarian tendencies because most of the authors in this genre are a) white and b) American. Sure, maybe a few SF authors who write about death n' destruction in the future are sitting cackling over their laptops as they describe the retribution that will be wreaked in the future by their steely-eyed legions, but not all of them. Not by a long chalk.

My fundamental issue is that we seem to be focusing solely on the pulp end of the spectrum in this discussion, which is equivalent to trying to discuss fiction concerning historical or current conflict by only looking at Andy McNab novels or Commando comics.
 
 
Nomad93
10:39 / 24.08.06
Richard Morgan's name has not been dropped yet and I think it should be. Compared to Heinlein and others, he may not be as strictly military as they are but the presence of Takeshi Kovacs, the protagonist of the trilogy (Altered Carbon, Broken Angels, Woken Furies), an ex-space commando, easily justifies the inclusion. Of the three, Broken Angels is most heavily military-oriented, but there is plenty of fighting in all of them plus the web of connections between them is very meticulous, something that one can probably fully appreciate only after getting to the third part.

What I think sets off Morgan's fiction from other "military SF" titles (whatever the monicker means) is precisely his politics - very subversive, very cynical about power structures which are not that different from ours in the novels' future universe. Both brutal and in some perverse way moral, Kovacs is one of the most complex characters in recent science fiction (I am tempted to say "in all science fiction"). Politics-wise, "Woken Furies" is the most interesting in its presentation of unusually un-idealistic revolutionary attitudes.

There are two interesting Morgan interviews available here:

http://trashotron.com/agony/indexes/audio_interview_index.htm

and a podcast here:

http://www.getapodcast.com/ViewMedia79457.aspx
 
 
STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK
12:12 / 24.08.06
I'm assuming you've already read it (because it should be compulsory) but in case you haven't, Joe Haldeman's The Forever War is a cracker. It's a good counterpoint to Heinlein's Starship Troopers- if ST was all about "war is cool! The strong are great!" then FW is all "Fuck that! I just got back from Vietnam and war sucks ass". But it's a fantastic adventure story at the same time.
 
 
STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK
12:41 / 24.08.06
Sorry- got so engrossed in reading the rest of the thread that I forgot you'd already mentioned this in the opening post. The I hit "reply" and was confronted with my own stupidity.
 
 
Happy Dave Has Left
13:31 / 24.08.06
Nomad, have to agree on Richard Morgan - I'd compare him to Lee Child actually, in the tone and some of the characterisation - my point being that the character of Takeshi Kovacs is an example of the 'Remarkable Man' common in most genre fiction. In the Jack Reacher novels, it's an ex-soldier who lives off the grid, in Morgan's novels, it's an ex-soldier who is onto his fifth body already and has super-speedy technology enhanced reflexes and a bad hangover. The archetypes are the same - exceptional, unusual individuals with estoric skills and abilities. What's different is the worlds they each explore through the course of their story.
 
 
Ticker
13:46 / 24.08.06
the barbe-pager alerted me to this thread, thank ya ED.

I read Weber and of course been raised on Heinlein. In reading Weber's Honor Harrington series (truth be told I fell off of it a while back) I never felt the author was glorifying violence. Rather the tragedy of death and carnage were presented in graphic ways to pound home the horror of conflict.

As my spouse loves to point out to me, conflict makes for great reading. Part of what is so engrossing is being sucked into the painful lives of well written characters and their ethical struggles.

Me loves the space opera but I don't believe in the works I've read, including Heinlein's, there is the glorification of violence and the military as much as there is the gritty examination of violence and sociopolitical structures relevant to our modern POV.

Heinlein may read at times like 'yay ass-kicking' but if you are really paying attention he is putting forth the idea of a society where the most vulnerable achieve self sufficiency in self defense via technology on a wild frontier. Heinlein is less about military and more about the rights of naked women to do as they wish with the aid of a small laser pistol.

Now I would put forth taking a glance at the current state of my world right now today that an author wishing to unravel some of the sociopolitical undercurrents might do very well dropping a snapshot of current affairs into a future context and wrenching on them. Does this mean they are glorifying violence or the ways we are currently trying to deal with large scale violence? I don't believe so as much as the goal is to extrapolate from our current perspective forward.
 
 
Axolotl
20:18 / 24.08.06
ED: Thanks for posting. You raise some good points and the engagement is exactly the kind of thing I was hoping for. Looking back on my opening post I do realise that I do come off a little harsh on the genre but I didn't mean to start this thread just to knock mil-sci-fi (clunky, but if I have to type it out in full every time I'll be here all night)more to start some analysis of it.
While I appreciate that the views expressed in a book by the characters or even the themes of a book may not reflect the author's views, I'm still don't think you can necessarily divorce the two completely. And even if you can, if one does write books that consistently express a certain viewpoint or ideology I do think readers have the right to at least raise questions about it.
Please also note that the authors I cited tend to be ones that I read the most and enjoy and I would place them above the "Commando in space" (nice analogy btw) school of writing and therefore my criticism of the worst excesses of the genre isn't necessarily a criticism of their work.
I'm not so sure that I agree that all space opera is part of this sub-genre, though that may be my own fault for framing the genre incorrectly. There's a big gulf between Star Trek, which arguably does fit the genre as I described it, but I would argue isn't mil-sci-fi and say Space: Above and Beyond which imho would fall into the genre.
I would also agree with you that at its best military science fiction can, like all science fiction, raise important questions and deal with these issues in a insightful way. Maybe it's just that when mil-sci-fi is bad, it's much worse than bad "regular" sci-fi that causes me to single it out for criticism.
But there is no denying that some of these books do feature some ideas that I find disturbing, maybe even because I recognise their appeal to me. Starship Troopers is one of my favourite books, but I loved it even more when I was fifteen and only later did I realise how unquestioningly I had accepted its ideology, which I now find slightly unsettling. Later I hope to pull some examples from some of these books of the ideas that did unsettle me & prompted me to start the thread.
Stoatie: Forever War is an excellent book. Am I correct in thinking there's a sequel?
Grant: As I say, I haven't read the book, so I may be being horribly unfair about it. There's a review here that may suggest I'm not though.
Nomad: Thanks for the reccomendation - I'll check Morgan out.
XK: I'm not really knocking Heinlein, I mean I've got a nearly complete collection dredged from carboot sales and the like. While he has his problems, especially in his later works, I still reckon he deserves his place in the pantheon up there with Clarke and Asimov.
Hmmmm. I've more to say but stuff to do, so will leave it for now.
 
 
Kiltartan Cross
01:06 / 25.08.06
I think, perhaps, that a defining aspect of mil-sci-fi (useful shortening, that) is that it generally transposes current (or past) social structures, specifically military ones, onto a futuristic backdrop (the details of which may or may not be coherently worked out); space opera and sf will generally have a stab at imagining a new society and an unfamiliar military.

This would, I suppose, lump together types like Honor Harrington against the likes of Ilia Volyova*; martial all round, but one uses an "old" social structure and the other a "new" one. It wouldn't by any means be perfect; Starship Troopers might be an exception to prove the rule!

I quite liked Honor, mind. Good for a giggle, and I'm a sucker for dreadnoughts.

*my money's on Ilia, although in the interests of a fair fight they should probably sling that bloody treecat out of the nearest airlock first**.
**I ran into a site a while back that specialises in just that kind of "what if?" Mindboggling; there were thousands of forum pages filled with people calculating the canonical weapon strength of a Star Destroyer and whether one could take the Enterprise in a fight and so on...
 
 
Ticker
13:33 / 25.08.06
No one was really knocking Heinlein any more than I was in my post.

Starship Troopers is mentioned as being problematic as mil-sci-fi. Why exactly?
Is it the citizen soldier concept?

If one approaches it within the framework of the story it is less about military duty and more about civic duty. The concept that one must offer one's life up to the society before being fully a member of that society is sure, sci-fi future poking, but how is it any worse than other concepts?

For example I find Orson Scott Card's Ender (using children as military weapons) way more unsettling ethically.
 
 
Kiltartan Cross
14:26 / 25.08.06
I'm not sure how I feel about that. On the one hand, I experienced the same "that's wrong" response after reading Ender's Game, on the other hand, there are so many stories in which children (and/or generic innocents) are footsoldiers (usually heroic ones) in the armies of Good that don't trigger that response. Is it the deception in Ender's Game that makes the difference, or the realism with which the story is told, or both, or what?
 
 
STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK
15:24 / 25.08.06
Stoatie: Forever War is an excellent book. Am I correct in thinking there's a sequel?

Yes, it's called Forever Free, and it's been sitting on my shelf, well, Forever, so I can't tell you much about it other than the reviews were good as far as I remember. (Every time I think about reading it I decide I should read FW again first, then after that I usually get distracted).

Confusingly there's also another Haldeman novel called Forever Peace (which came out at roughly the same time as Forever Free, though a year or so earlier), which is NOT a sequel, but is described as a "companion piece" or something of the sort- I guess they're supposed to complement each other, but again, I've not read it, though again reviews were good.
 
 
Axolotl
16:30 / 25.08.06
My problem with Starship Troopers is the idea of limiting the franchise, doubly so when you limit it to a bunch of veterans. That's basically a military coup and yet this is presented as a good thing.
Even if you take the generous view and say, as Heinlein maintained, that it was about civic duty being rewarded by the vote then essentially you're talking about taking the vote away from people because you think they can't be trusted to use it "correctly", which is frankly bollocks on so many levels. It also smacks of arguments given by entrenched power structures throughout history on why people shouldn't be free.
 
 
Ticker
19:22 / 25.08.06
talking about taking the vote away from people because you think they can't be trusted to use it "correctly", which is frankly bollocks on so many levels.

My reading of the text was different. I read it as a society agreeing that only those who dedicated their live and purpose for a period of time to serve the society were eligble to participate in the decision making process of the society. I'm not saying I agree with it as a blue print but I don't believe it was merely saying certain people couldn't be trusted to use the vote correctly.

..er at what point do we go get our copies and start a new thread on this?

p.s I love axolotls and miss my last pair very much. *sigh*
 
 
Kiltartan Cross
21:09 / 25.08.06
..er at what point do we go get our copies and start a new thread on this?
I've just been reading a bit of Plutarch on Sparta for light entertainment. Enfranchised military class? The relevant quote would perhaps be:

"Nowhere were free men freer, or slaves more enslaved."

If memory serves me right it gave them five hundred years or so of brutal preeminence, but you sure as hell wouldn't want to emulate them.
 
 
Happy Dave Has Left
18:28 / 28.08.06
The Culture books by Iain M Banks are very much war and conflict based. I'm going to brew up a much longer post about both them and the whole 'service gaurantees citizenship' meme.

Sorry, it's late and I'm Bank Holidayed out.
 
 
grant
21:04 / 29.08.06
Just read that review of the Nazi book.

Wow -- it really does sound wingnutty, don't it.

The jacket copy tries to tell us this book's depiction of the Nazis is "unbiased" and examines both "all that was good, and evil, about the most infamous military force in history...." Let's set aside the fact that the "unbiased" claim is about as laughable as Fox News's "fair and balanced" slogan. (The revived SS are unambiguously the heroes; the "liberals" who try to oppose them, thus making the world more vulnerable to Posleen attack, unambiguously the villains.) The mere fact that this book has the balls to use the phrase "all that was good" in reference to the fucking Nazis in the first place shows how morally adrift the entire enterprise is.

...But Kratman knows his intended audience, and is only too happy to assuage the bloodlust of the red state rabble by letting our valiant SS paladins bust some hippie heads.

Presumably, the folks meant to swallow this stuff aren't supposed to notice that the dramatic goal of the whole scene is to depict Nazis as victims and have you cheer them as heroes!


I'm wondering, though, if the dirtiness the reviewer feels in reading the thing might be, I dunno, a part of the text worth further analysis. Maybe I've been brainwashed by the idea of the intentional fallacy (the idea that authorial intention is secondary to whatever effect the text actually has -- if you're revolted when the author wants you to be enthralled, your revulsion is a valid critical response and the intended enthrallment is beside the point).

On the other hand, it also doesn't sound like it'd be any good as fiction.
 
 
STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK
21:18 / 29.08.06
I know this is slightly off-topic, but given that we're talking about Nazism and pulp skiffy, I'd recommend everyone here at all interested in the interface between the two read Norman Spinrad's The Iron Dream.

It's a pulp skiffy novel "by Adolf Hitler", written as if from an alternate universe where Hitler became a writer, rather than a dictator. It's VERY convincing as a late 30s space opera... and it's VERY good at pointing up the latent Fascism behind a lot of the oeuvre. Spinrad rocks for many reasons, but this is one of the main ones.
 
 
Happy Dave Has Left
07:39 / 30.08.06
Doesn't sound off topic at all Stoat, I'll look it out - although, could you qualify this statement:

latent Fascism behind a lot of the oeuvre?

Take it you're talking about 'Nazis in Spaaaaaace' here? Or is this broader? Because, as you'll see upthread, I have issues with that being taken as read, because if mil skiffy is taken as a genre where latent fascism is the rule, rather than the exception, it prejudices every reading of it.
 
 
Happy Dave Has Left
08:12 / 30.08.06
Here's my promised longer posting on the Culture, Iain Banks' anarcho-libertarian civilisation.

For those who haven't read the Culture books (you should, they're awesome), Iain Banks has created a galaxy-spanning civilisation that floats somewhere in the uncomfortable space between pre-Singularity machine consciousness and biological anarchistic hedonism. The society is composed of millions of races, as well as machine consciousnesses called Minds and their smaller brethren, Drones. Modified post-humans are the main characters in most of the Culture books, ably assisted by Drone companions and carted around the Galaxy by enormous Ships, which often have witty or whimsical names (my personal favourite is the General Contact Unit A Series of Unlikely Explanations).

So far, so idyllic. The Culture at its heart is a cashless, post-scarcity society, where the vast majority are free to live out their hyper-extended lives living a Sybaritic, hedonistic and largely consequence free existence. It reads like a near-constant fin-de-seicle Garden of Eden, a repeating Golden Age. It looks amazing, for a while at least, but ultimately a little boring.

Some of the members of this society choose to join Contact, which is the Culture's military, diplomatic corps and trading arm rolled into one. These people voyage out to worlds all over the Galaxy, contacting new species, setting up trade relations, and, quite often, meddling quite spectacularly. There's no Trekkian Prime Directive in force here - the Culture is quite happy to meddle as long as such meddling results in a positive outcome for the Culture itself. And quite often, they'll use Special Circumstances, which is the 'dirty tricks' arm of Contact.

The Culture also fights all-out wars (the Idiran War described in the first Culture book being one of many) using both proxy forces and its own units. In evidence here is the brutalistic side of the Culture, with its overtly named Rapid Offensive Units (Frank Exchange of Views (Psychopath Class), Killing Time (Torturer Class). There is also a definite and deliberate split between the military and the civilian aspects of society, with the majority of the Culture in blissful or intentional ignorance of the activities of Special Circumstances. They could be seen as an analogue of the volunteer militaries of modern liberal democracies, except that service in Contact or Special Circumstances is seen by this society as a dalliance, which can be terminated at will. The Minds can run these missions themselves, can fight enormous battles with only a few Von Neumann replicators and some raw materials to build new ships with, but they choose to bring along humans and other species who volunteer, but who are, given the technology level of the Minds, largely interested spectators in each conflict.

This is another example of a differing perspective on military action in SF, where humans have become observers of battles fought by our machines - it's tempting to assign this a different value to the work of, say Heinlein, because my fuzzy understanding of Banks' politics is significantly better than my understanding of Heinleins. But can we really know? Is this a satire or an examination of our accelerating trend toward push-button warfare, shooting people like a video game from the sky? Is it somehow more honest to be down on the ground bayoneting people? Or does Banks think a universe where machines fight our wars for us is more preferable? What if the machines are sentient?

Like I said, there's more than one side to militarism in science fiction. And that's what makes it so fascinating to both read, discuss and dissect.

More on the Culture by Banks himself.
 
 
STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK
10:45 / 30.08.06
as you'll see upthread, I have issues with that being taken as read, because if mil skiffy is taken as a genre where latent fascism is the rule

Not so much mil skiffy, but pulp space opera of the 30s and 40s. I also don't think it's "taken as read", but it's definitely the position Spinrad's coming from.
 
 
Happy Dave Has Left
11:32 / 30.08.06
Gotcha, thanks for the clarification Stoat
 
 
Henningjohnathan
14:07 / 30.08.06
I'm assuming you've already read it (because it should be compulsory) but in case you haven't, Joe Haldeman's The Forever War is a cracker. It's a good counterpoint to Heinlein's Starship Troopers- if ST was all about "war is cool! The strong are great!" then FW is all "Fuck that! I just got back from Vietnam and war sucks ass". But it's a fantastic adventure story at the same time.
I also preferred the more satirical over-the-top interpretation of STARSHIP TROOPERS in Verhoeven's film. Criminally underrated especially when it seemed obvious the producers, looking for a franchise with merchandising and a snappy name, had no clue exactly what Verhoeven was doing.

Another interesting SF novel that takes a look at the philosophy behind the "future trooper" is Walter Jon William's VOICE OF THE WHIRLWIND. In it, the hero is the memetic clone of a super-soldier veteran of a war with aliens (along the lines of Haldemann's forever soldiers). In it, intergalactic conglomerates have the armies and he explores with the Zen Fascist philosophy the companies use to create perfect killers. A lot of very interesting speculation tied to a fairly well done future thriller.
 
 
STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK
14:47 / 30.08.06
I also preferred the more satirical over-the-top interpretation of STARSHIP TROOPERS in Verhoeven's film. Criminally underrated especially when it seemed obvious the producers, looking for a franchise with merchandising and a snappy name, had no clue exactly what Verhoeven was doing.

I totally agree- I thought the movie was genius in that it effectively satirised the source material by playing it straight, as it were. It worked a lot like the Spinrad in that respect.
 
 
Kiltartan Cross
21:56 / 30.08.06
I loved the film of Starship Troopers, with one tiny niggle: the original cinema trailers for the film used Song 2 as a soundtrack (over the "invade the Bugs! Shoot at them lots! Aaargh!" bits) and it absolutely fucking rocked. But the film itself never used it... I digress. Loved the way it was played.

Has anyone read the Douglas Hill (children's sci-fi) books featuring Keill Randor (a sort of Wolverine equivalent, if Wolverine was the radioactive last survivor of a planet of Spartan ninja hero mercenaries)? They featured a curious exaltation of "responsible" martial prowess; the legions of Moros would only intervene on the "good" side (ha!) in wars.
 
 
STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK
10:17 / 31.08.06
Ooh, the Last Legionary stuff? I loved those when I was a kid, but had totally forgotten about them until now. Hmm... may have to find them again.
 
 
Kiltartan Cross
11:20 / 31.08.06
They're a bugger to get hold of, I'm afraid, and I was a bit disappointed the second time around. Good for a giggle and for nostalgia, though.

A series which springs to mind as an example of military SF of a very thoughtful bent are CJ Cherryh's Alliance-Union books, which are quite hard SF and which focus very strongly on the interpersonal relationships of the combatants on all sides of a complicated struggle (very loosely, between Earth and colonies), with side excursions into a couple of peculiar alien mindsets.
 
 
Phex: Dorset Doom
14:46 / 31.08.06
Ooh, the Last Legionary stuff? I loved those when I was a kid, but had totally forgotten about them until now. Hmm... may have to find them again.

If you do I've got second dibbs- my fondest memories are of finishing my work half an hour before everybody in the class so I could go to the school library and read the Last Legionaire books, 'Young Legionaire' being my favorite. It was a prequel to the four main books, in which the Legionaire in question goes through the incredibly tough training regime of his Spartan-ninja-commando army, kind of Ender's Game from a grunts-eye-view. It was probably terrible but when you're eight years old it it rocks ultimate.
 
 
Axolotl
16:20 / 31.08.06
I remember those as well. I really enjoyed them, though if I remember correctly I never managed to get hold of the last one in the series.
Phex I agree with you: the first one rocked the hardest.
 
 
Rayvern
09:47 / 08.09.06
Quite a number of the Epic Sci-fi series include an reasonable level of Military Sci-Fi, even though they are not wholly focussed on it.

Examples include Dune (to a degree), and the Dread Empire's Fall series (starting with The Praxis - reasonably well thought out Relativistic fleet battles and a Guerilla campaign running in parallel).

Kinsman and Millenium by Ben Bova are also pretty good reads (for near future militry operations in Earth orbit - very good reads these. Nicely handled "psychological effects of first kill" too).

I'm not sure, but I seem to recall there being a prequel to 'The Forever War' - 'Hero' or something like that?
 
 
Hydra vs Leviathan
12:48 / 08.09.06
Oh frigging hell, "Last Legionary", yeah, that was truly, truly awful (in hindsight)... i thought they must have been so obscure (because so dire) that only my school library ever had copies of them... the same author, IIRC, did a series called "Masters of Demons" or something similar, that had a bunch of kids with various psionic/elemental powers in a world ruled by "demons" that could only be killed by psionic weaponry... kind of "Lord of Light"-very-very-lite...

I do have some thoughts about real-life-historical military tropes in sci-fi (tho "military" as an adjective is one descriptor that tends to turn me off any sort of book), but they'll probably have to wait until i have a bit more posting time...

[OT]

I ran into a site a while back that specialises in just that kind of "what if?" Mindboggling; there were thousands of forum pages filled with people calculating the canonical weapon strength of a Star Destroyer and whether one could take the Enterprise in a fight and so on...

Comic Book Rumbles?

[/OT]
 
  

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