PREFACE
If a realistic appraisal of human nature and the lessons of history lead you, as it has led us, to the reluctant conclusion that as long as human beings are still human beings as we understand them, then war—of one sort or another, on one scale or another, in one arena or another—will probably always be part of the human condition . . . and as long as you postulate that our high-tech civilization will remain intact and keep on growing and evolving (instead of suffering some kind of disaster or societal crash—such as a too-catastrophic war, for instance—that dumps us back to the Dark Ages or wipes us out altogether) . . . and if you then assume, as seems likely, that in that high-tech future the human race will continue to expand into space, with more and more people living on the moons and planets of the solar system, and eventually perhaps even reaching toward the stars . . . then, inevitably, one is led to conclude that the future will include war in space as well . . . and that therefore soldiers will be needed to fight those wars in space.
Space soldiers. The poor bastards who will have to put their lives on the line to enforce policies made by politicians millions of miles—or perhaps even millions of light-years—away, the ones who will do the actual fighting, and the dying, whether it’s in deep space, on an alien world, or on the airless surface of some frozen moon or asteroid. The ones who by battle’s end will be just as dead as their distant comrades on uncountable battlefields back to the dawn of time, no matter that they’re killed by a high-intensity plasma burst or the impact of an antimatter pellet rather than by a stone ax. The ones who will have to try to kill some other soldier before they can succeed in killing them, no matter if the weapon they take in hand to do that is a bronze spear or a laser gun. The ones who will wonder if they’ll live to see another dawn, whether they’re in orbit around a star in the Vega system or trudging across the frozen surface of one of Jupiter’s moons.
These space soldiers will be fighting on battlefields totally unique in the bloody history of warfare, facing tactical problems and technical challenges that no soldier has ever had to face before, wielding weapons that it may be literally impossible for us to imagine, even here at the threshold of the twenty-first century . . . but the nine science fiction writers in this book, daring and expert dreamers, take their best shot at imagining these unimaginable futures for you, in the process delivering some of the most exciting, suspenseful, action-packed, and intensely imaginative science fiction ever written.
So turn the page, and enjoy the fictions you’ll find here while they are still fictions, before they’re drafting you to take part in a campaign in Luna’s Sea of Tranquility, or around the rings of Saturn . . .
For other stories of high-tech futuristic warfare, try the Ace anthologies Future War, Invaders!, Hackers, and Isaac Asimov’s War.