WAR

   One of the principal imaginative stimuli to futuristic and scientific speculation has been the possibility of war, and the possibility that new TECHNOLOGY might transform war. This stimulus was particularly importantduring the period 1870-1914 and in the years following the revelation of the atom bomb in 1945.Antique futuristic fictions such as the anonymous Reign of George VI, 1900-25 (1763) anticipate little change in thebusiness of war; here King George, sabre in hand, leads his cavalry in the charge. In the mid-19th century, however, awareness of technological change spread rapidly. Herrmann LANG was able to envisage very different patterns of future combat in The Air Battle (1859), and many new technologies were displayed during the US Civil War (1861-5) and observed by representatives of various European nations. When the German Empire was consolidated after the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 the strength and firepower of the new German Army inspired an urgent campaign for the reform and rearmament of the British Army. The case was dramatized by Sir George CHESNEY in The Battle of Dorking (1871 chap), a drama-documentaryillustrating the ease with which an invading German army might reach London. It caused a sensation, and initiated a debate which continueduntil WWI itself broke out (INVASION). A new subgenre of fiction had been inaugurated, and future-war stories were established as a brand of popular romance; the development of the subgenre, well documented in I.F. CLARKE's Voices Prophesying War, 1763-1984 (1966), featured such successfulalarmist works as Erskine CHILDERS's The Riddle of the Sands (1903) and William LE QUEUX's The Invasion of 1910 (1906), which made a great impactwhen it was serialized in the newborn Daily Mail. Many products of this glut of jingoistic fiction enthusiastically embraced the myth of a war to end war - enthusiastically mapped out in Louis TRACY's The Final War (1896)-and the popularity of this kind of fiction helped to generate thegreat enthusiasm which Britons carried into the real war against Germany when it finally came. The great bulk of this fiction was relatively mundane, envisaging quite modest alterations in tactics as a result of new TECHNOLOGY. The Captain of the Mary Rose (1892) by W. Laird Clowes(1856-1905), Blake of the Rattlesnake (1895) by Fred T. JANE and "Danger!" (1914) by Arthur Conan DOYLE are outstanding examples of the realistic school of speculation; and the most careful of them all, The Great War of 189 - : A Forecast (1893) by P.H. Colomb (1831-1899) and other militaryexperts, instituted a tradition of drama-documentaries subsequently carried forward by Hector C. BYWATER's The Great Pacific War (1925) and, much later, The Third World War (1979) by General Sir John HACKETT and others.Airships and submarines were by far the most popular innovations in early future-war fiction. They were displayed to lavish effect by George GRIFFITH, the most extravagant of the subgenre's writers, in The Angel ofthe Revolution (1893) and Olga Romanoff (1894). The discovery of X-rays in 1895 encouraged writers to dream up more fanciful new WEAPONS; inGriffith's posthumously published The Lord of Labour (1911), the future war is fought with atomic missiles and disintegrator rays. The worst excesses of this subgenre are parodied in Michael MOORCOCK's The Warlord of the Air (1971) and The Land Leviathan (1974); Moorcock also edited a notable theme anthology of works from the period, published in 2 vols as Before Armageddon (anth 1975) and England Invaded (anth 1977). Anambitious but reasonably disciplined imagination was brought to bear by H. G. WELLS in "The Land Ironclads" (1903), The War in the Air (1908) and theatom-bomb story The World Set Free (1914). The British High Command, however, continued to the bitter end to show an extreme conservatism of imagination, refusing to believe in the potential of the tank, the submarine or the aeroplane until they were shown the way by the Germans.Future-war stories enjoyed a second heyday in the UK between theWars, when the actual example of WWI caused many writers to believe that a new war might mean the end of civilization - a conviction bleakly expressed by Edward SHANKS in The People of the Ruins (1920) and Cicely HAMILTON in Theodore Savage (1922). This kind of anxiety intensified insuch novels as Neil BELL's The Gas War of 1940 (1931 as Miles; vt Valiant Clay 1934 as NB) and John GLOAG's Tomorrow's Yesterday (1932), and becamealmost hysterical as Europe lurched towards a new war following Hitler's rise to power (see also HITLER WINS). Invasion from the Air: A Prophetic Novel (1934) by Frank McIlraith and Roy CONNOLLY, Day of Wrath (1936) byJoseph O'NEILL and Four Days War (1936) by S. Fowler WRIGHT all feature chilling accounts of cities devastated by aerial bombing with poison gas.US future-war fiction was not so prolific, nor-understandably, in view of the USA's very different experience of WWI - did it ever become so pessimistic. Frank R. STOCKTON's The Great War Syndicate (1889) and Stanley WATERLOO's Armageddon (1898) are mild by comparison withcontemporary UK works, and the invasion of the USA by Asiatics, although a staple of pulp melodrama, never really seemed likely enough to inspire genuine alarmist fantasy. The bleakest visions of future war written in the USA before 1945 - Herbert BEST's The Twenty-Fifth Hour (1940) and L. Ron HUBBARD's Final Blackout (1940; 1948) - both describe the devastationof Europe. This situation changed dramatically, however, with the advent of the atom bomb, which bred an alarmism all of its own and inspired a new subgenre of stories concerning the HOLOCAUST AND AFTER.Wells's THE WAR OF THE WORLDS (1898) was a logical extension of the more conventional19th-century future-war story, as was Robert William COLE's story of colonial war against Sirian aliens in The Struggle for Empire (1900), but the other-worldly wars fought in most pulp interplanetary romance of the Edgar Rice BURROUGHS school were mostly fought with swords. The specialistsf pulps, however, embraced a more conscientiously futuristic outlook whereby interplanetary wars were to be fought by fleets of SPACESHIPS armed with marvellous ray-guns and the like. SPACE OPERA thrived on wars between races, worlds and GALACTIC EMPIRES. Wherever its HEROES went they found cosmic conflicts in progress, and they never felt inhibited about joining in. Such was the moral insight of pulp fantasists that these heroes hardly ever had the slightest difficulty in selecting the "right" side: it was handsome and honourable vs ugly and treacherous.The quest to discover bigger and more powerful weapons was driven to its limits in a few short years. Spectacular genocide became commonplace, as in Edmond HAMILTON's "The Other Side of the Moon" (1929), and stars were blown up inprolific quantity. War waged across time between ALTERNATE WORLDS was invented by Jack WILLIAMSON in THE LEGION OF TIME (1938; 1952). Anti-war stories like Miles J. BREUER's "The Gostaks and the Doshes" (1930) and Nat SCHACHNER's "World Gone Mad" (1935) were in a tiny minority until theoutbreak of war in Europe in 1939 helped encourage a new seriousness, most conscientiously displayed in John W. CAMPBELL Jr's ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION, where A.E. VAN VOGT began chronicling The War Against theRull (1940-50; fixup 1959). Ross ROCKLYNNE's "Quietus" (1940) made an issue of the dilemma which had been so easily sidestepped in the past: when visitors from elsewhere find two creatures locked in conflict, how do they choose which to help? After WWII, anti-war stories appeared far more frequently in the sf magazines; notable are several stories by Eric Frank RUSSELL, including "Late Night Final" (1948) and "I am Nothing" (1952),and several by Fritz LEIBER, including "The Foxholes of Mars" (1952) and "A Bad Day for Sales" (1953). More ironic approaches to the questioninclude several stories in which war has become institutionalized as a spectator sport (GAMES AND SPORTS), such as Gunner Cade (1952) by Cyril Judd (C.M. KORNBLUTH and Judith MERRIL) and Mack REYNOLDS's Mercenary fromTomorrow (1962 as "Mercenary"; exp 1968). Sf writers' reflections on WWII itself are assembled in The Fantastic World War II (anth 1990) ed Frank McSherry Jr and S.M. STIRLING, while notable stories of nuclear war arecollected in Countdown to Midnight (anth 1984) ed H. Bruce FRANKLIN.Although the possibility of future wars on Earth and images ofnuclear holocaust dominated the imagination of sf writers from 1945 through the 1950s, more exotic wars continued to be fought, and stories of interplanetary or interstellar war became a safer haven for militaristic adventures. The melodramatic excesses of space-opera warfare faded with the pulps, although they never entirely died out, and there grew up a more disciplined and more realistic notion of the kind of armies which might fight interplanetary and interstellar wars, and the kinds of weapons they might use. In this context a new tradition of militaristic sf grew up in the 1950s and 1960s, notable early examples being Robert A. HEINLEIN's STARSHIP TROOPERS (1959) and Gordon R. DICKSON's The Genetic General(1960; exp vt DORSAI! 1976). The latter began the long-running Dorsai series, which aspires to offer a serious commentary on the evolution and ethics of militarism and is still being extended through such novels as The Chantry Guild (1988). Other important early contributors to thistradition include Poul ANDERSON, as in The Star Fox (fixup 1965); it was most aggressively carried forward through the 1970s by Jerry POURNELLE in such novels as A Spaceship for the King (1973) and The Mercenary (1977). The initial historical context of this fiction was provided by the KoreanWar, where the intervention of UN troops embodied a new philosophy of military action and responsibility, but doubts about the role played by US forces were subsequently amplified in no uncertain terms by the progress of the Vietnam War. Ideas about the moral justifiability of war and the POLITICS of militarism became matters of fierce debate, exemplified in sfby such novels as Joe HALDEMAN's THE FOREVER WAR (fixup 1974), clearly modelled on STARSHIP TROOPERS but overturning many of the assumptions the earlier novel had taken for granted, and Norman SPINRAD's vivid and vitriolic The Men in the Jungle (1967). Spinrad went on to write The Iron Dream (1972), in which the fascist fantasies of one Adolf Hitler, whoemigrated to the USA in the early 1930s and became a minor sf writer, superimpose all the CLICHES of pulp future-war fantasies on the rise of the Third Reich, the fighting of WWII and the "final solution" to the problem of the insidious "Dominators". The most successful mainstream anti-war novel of the 1960s, Joseph Heller's Catch-22 (1961), influenced sf stories like Barry N. MALZBERG's "Final War" (1968 as K.M. O'Donnell), which represents war as a surreal and purposeless nightmare.The polarization of the sf community by the political conflict over the Vietnam War was vividly illustrated by a pair of advertisements whichappeared in GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION (June 1968), listing on facing pages those sf writers for and against the War. Memories of that war have continued to haunt sf, directly reflected in such anthologies as In the Field of Fire (anth 1987) ed Jeanne Van Buren Dann and Jack DANN and suchnovels as The Healer's War (1988) by Elizabeth Ann Scarborough (1947-) and Dream Baby (1989) by Bruce MCALLISTER, and indirectly in such novels as Lucius SHEPARD's Life during Wartime (1987). Alongside these works, however, the tradition of militaristic sf has not only flourished since the Vietnam War's end but has become extraordinarily strident. David A. DRAKE, author of several horror stories reflecting his own experiences inVietnam, has written numerous books about the heroic exploits of future mercenaries, including the Hammer's Slammers sequence: Hammer's Slammers (coll of linked stories 1979), The Forlorn Hope (1984), Rolling Hot (1989)and The Warrior (1991). These books helped initiate a fad that has been extrapolated in various anthologies and SHARED-WORLD series and in novels such as The Warrior's Apprentice (1986) and its sequels by Lois McMaster BUJOLD. Other fiercely militaristic sf novels of the 1980s includeChristopher ANVIL's The Steel, the Mist and the Blazing Sun (1983) and Joel ROSENBERG's Zionist Not for Glory (1988). The annual series of anthologies begun with There Will Be War (anth 1983) ed Pournelle and John F. CARR, following Reginald BRETNOR's earlier anthology series The Futureat War (3 vols 1979-80), has generated some controversy. This subgenre has merged with and absorbed various older materials, including Fred SABERHAGEN's Berserker series begun in 1963 and the episode in LarryNIVEN's Known Space future history expanded for The Man-Kzin Wars SHARED-WORLD series (3 vols 1988-90). Although the popularity of this kind of fiction can be largely accounted for simply as a love of melodrama, it does seem to reflect an innate aggression in US culture - a concept discussed at some length by H. Bruce Franklin in his excellent study of war as a theme in US imaginative fiction, War Stars: The Superweapon and the American Imagination (1988).

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