INTRODUCTION
by David Weber
WHAT IS “MILITARY SCIENCE FICTION”?
Human beings are toolmakers. We are also list-makers. We like to be able to label things, group them together for easy conceptual handling. Marketing people are especially fond of that tendency on our part, because sticking a label on something is a form of shorthand that makes it easier to reach a specific readership, and the marketing classifications assigned to some stories probably end up with a lot of readers scratching their heads and wondering what the heck marketing was thinking.
“Military science fiction” is all too often a case in point.
I’ve been writing it for about thirty years now, and the one thing that I can tell you for certain about the genre’s definition is that it means different things to different people. It comes in all sorts of flavors and, like all storytelling, it can be well told or badly. It can range from what I think of as “splatter porn,” stories in which the gore runs as deep as a slasher movie, to stories in which there are no casualties at all. It can be “space opera,” written on the macro scale about entire nations, armies, and fleets, or about just two opponents . . . or even about only a single character. It can come from any political or ideological perspective, it can worry about the “why” of a war or concentrate solely on the “what” of the human beings caught up in it. The one thing “military science fiction” isn’t is a neatly defined, no-problem-to-label genre.
The stories in this year’s anthology illustrate many of the previous paragraph’s points, especially the last sentence’s, and add a few wrinkles of their own.
Personally (and not just because they publish so many of my stories, honest!), I think Baen Books may have the best feel for what constitutes military science fiction, and the inclusion of the stories I just listed above in this anthology is one reason that I do. Baen understands that the central aspect of military science fiction—like any form of fiction, when you come down to it—resides in the characters’ struggles to overcome adversity. In this particular genre, struggles are more likely to be ones of life or death, but that isn’t always the case, any more than that sort of mortal conflict is unique to military science fiction or military fiction generally.
I think part of the problem with nailing the genre down is that list-making tendency of ours itself. We want neat boundaries, clearly discernible delimitations. That’s why we make lists in the first place, for goodness sake! And, like most things which concern human beings, the boundaries for “military” fiction are usually pretty sloppy. Put another way, there’s a lot of “bleed” in the borderlands between stories which belong unmistakably to any one genre and those that belong equally unmistakably to another. Like war itself, stories about it don’t admit of ease of labeling.
Science fiction is a very broad field, with plenty of room for all sorts of stories, all manner of genres and subgenres. As I have a tendency to point out on panels at science fiction conventions, science fiction is the fairytales of a technological society. Instead of wizards, golems, and deadly curses, we have scientists and engineers, AIs and androids, nanotech and genetic engineering. We use different tools, different exemplars, because we have fundamentally different concepts and understandings of how the universe works, but we are telling the same stories. And we are telling them for the same purposes: to inspire, to explain, to caution and warn, and—always—to engage the people in our audience, whether they are sitting around a Neanderthal campfire knapping flint while they listen or kicked back with an e-book reader in their laps while Lady Gaga plays in the background. Military fiction, whether it be the tale of Arthur at Camlann, of Roland at Roncevaux, of Aragorn leading Gondor and Rohan to the Black Gates, or of Lieutenant Colonel Bill Cage and Rita Vrataski dying again and again in alien-occupied France, is still about the same challenges, the same sacrifices, and the same costs. It still tells us the same things about ourselves.
Writers are entertainers. Now, “entertain” can have more than one meaning. For example, my ancient and beloved, genuine hardcopy, American Heritage Dictionary, defines entertain as:
1. To hold the attention of with something amusing or diverting;
2. To extend hospitality toward: entertain friends at dinner;
3a To consider, contemplate: entertain an idea;
3b To hold in mind; harbor: entertained few illusions.
As craftsmen, we take that first point seriously, if we are going to practice our craft well. And, of course, if we hope to be able to actually pay the bills at the end of the day. If we don’t accomplish that aspect of our job, our readers aren’t going to reward us by actually, you know, buying our stuff. But we also need to be “entertainers” in the sense of the third point of that definition. And for purveyors of military fiction, that means we need to examine—“contemplate”—what it is to be a human being in the crucible. We need to share with the reader what it means to face and survive—or not survive—in the midst of carnage, confusion, and conflict. We need to caution, to warn, and, yes, to inspire.
Today, in the Western World, personal experience of military conflict is actually quite rare and concentrated in hugely disproportionate fashion among those who volunteer for military service. Civilians take it for granted that they will be protected from conflict by those who serve in the military, and those who do not serve in the military have little or no first-hand familiarity with what our military guardians experience in our place. Most professional Soldiers, Sailors, Airmen, and Marines of my acquaintance think that’s the way it’s supposed to be. That if it isn’t that way, they aren’t doing their jobs. But because they are, those of us standing behind them have no personal, experiential guide to what it is we truly ask of them.
One of the responsibilities of those of us who write military fiction is to provide a window into what we ask of them. Into the consequences of what is demanded of them. Not simply to venerate them, or to celebrate the “thin line of heroes,” although that is one of our responsibilities, because the men and women who have died for us deserve to be venerated and celebrated, but also to help us understand. To recognize not just what they have given and are giving for us, but the fact that they stand where they stand, face what they face, because we put them there.
And we need to understand the price they pay for being there because if we don’t—if we trivialize it or romanticize it into something one bit less horrible than it is—we forget that the reason we put them there had damned well better be worth that price.
And we also need to understand that war isn’t going away.
Ever.
War is an obscene thing, but it is also a very human thing. We can—and over the millennia, philosophers have written millions of words to—deplore that second truth, but we cannot deny it with any degree of intellectual honesty. War, conflict, violence, the solution of irreconcilable differences by violence, is one face of who and what we are. Understanding it is a part of understanding – or at least facing—our own inner nature. And, like our inner nature, war is so complex, so ambiguous, so dependent upon the observer’s perspective, that it simply will not admit of the neat definitions and limitations so dear to our list-makers’ heart.
Which is why writers of military fiction portray it in so very many different ways. If we’re honest with ourselves and our readers, it’s not the story of how one side is universally heroic and noble and the other side is universally vile and depraved. It’s also not the story of how only “bad guys” get killed, of how the characters we love get free passes, of how civilians don’t get ground to pulp in the gears, or of how those maimed and crippled physically or mentally always triumph over the lingering consequences of what’s happened to them. “Honest” military fiction doesn’t all have to be dark and savagely brooding, as some of the stories in this very anthology demonstrate, and it doesn’t all have to argue that all war is automatically evil any more than it needs to simplistically celebrate the fact that “our war” was just and noble. (It was, of course, because we are such inherently just and noble people, right? Riiiiiight!) But it does need to play fair with its subject matter and its readership.
At bottom, military fiction, like war itself, is about both yin and yang, about both war’s destructiveness and what it preserves. About the carnage and about the war-fighters—not all of them soldiers—who protect the civilians behind them. I think we read military fiction for the same reasons we read most kinds of fiction: to see inside ourselves. Oh, we read it for the heroes and heroines we admire and love, for the villains we despise and hate, for the excitement and the conflict. But all of those things—heroes, villains, excitement, conflict—are vehicles for understanding who we are, both as a species and as individuals.
Humanity didn’t claw its way to the top of the evolutionary ladder of an entire planet by being shy, retiring, and timid. We got there by being the meanest bastards in the valley. That doesn’t mean we can’t be perfectly nice people, doesn’t mean we can’t care deeply for those we love and cherish, doesn’t mean we can’t build societies designed to limit the consequences of our inner bastards. It doesn’t mean we can’t recognize the consequences of our actions and seek to ameliorate them, and it sure as hell doesn’t mean we can’t at least try really, really hard to resist the darker side of our nature. It does mean that we are who we are, though, and that’s the side of us that military fiction, specifically, examines.
Military science fiction simply examines those same aspects of who and what we are in a science fiction format. Projected into the futures, the alternate possibilities, science fiction plays with every day. Those of us who write it write it because examining those aspects is important to us, for whatever reason, and those of us who read it, read it because examining them is important to us. It’s really that simple . . . and that incredibly complex.
Baen Books has brought you a collection of short stories that come at “military science fiction” from a vast number of perspectives. I almost said “from every conceivable perspective,” but that particular bit of hyperbole would be especially ill chosen talking about something like, oh, conflict, human nature, and the vast complexity of why human beings make war.
But one thing we do know. As long as human beings are human beings, there will be war. And as long as there are wars, storytellers will tell stories about the men and women who fight them, who die in them, and who survive them.
That’s what this anthology does, and I think it does it well.
Now go read it.