WEAPONS

   In the catalogue of possible technological wonders offered in the New Atlantis (1627; 1629), Francis BACON included more powerful cannon, better explosives and "wildfires burning in water, unquenchable". Such promises could not be left out if his prospectus were to appeal to the political establishment - his most important predecessor as a designer of hypothetical machines, Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519), had likewise sought sponsorship on the basis of his ingenuity as a military engineer.In the second half of the 19th century, when the effects of technological progress on society became the subject of widespread speculation, the advance of weaponry became one of the most important stimulants of the imagination. George CHESNEY's The Battle of Dorking (1871 chap) popularized the concern felt by a number of politicians that the UK's armaments had fallen considerably behind the times. In the new genre of popular fiction which it inspired, the future- WAR story, speculation about the weapons of the future soon became ambitious. In The Angel of the Revolution (1893) George GRIFFITH imagined a world war fought withairships and submarines, armed with unprecedentedly powerful explosives. The French artist Albert ROBIDA offered spectacular images of futureweaponry in action in La guerre au vingtieme siecle ("War in the 20th Century") (1887). Jules VERNE's Face au drapeau (1896; trans as For theFlag 1897) features the "fulgurator", a powerful explosive device with a "boomerang" action - a primitive guided missile. H.G. WELLS's "The Land Ironclads" (1903) foresaw the development of the tank, and bacteriological warfare was anticipated in T. Mullett ELLIS's Zalma (1895) and M.P. SHIEL's The Yellow Danger (1898).The discovery of X-rays and radioactivityin the last years of the 19th century gave a tremendous boost to the hypothetical armaments industry. The imagination of writers leaped ahead to imagine all kinds of weapons causing or using the energy of atomic breakdown. In The Lord of Labour (1911) George Griffith described a war fought with atomic missiles and disintegrator rays, and awesome rays have remained a standard part of the sf armoury ever since. During WWI William LE QUEUX attempted to raise morale with his account of the fight todevelop a new ray to function as The Zeppelin Destroyer (1916). Percy F. Westerman's The War of the Wireless Waves (1923) was one of countlessNEAR FUTURE thrillers featuring arms races; here the British ZZ rays must counter the menace of the German Ultra-K ray.Criminal SCIENTISTS often armed themselves with marvellous rays or atomic disintegrators, as in Edmund SNELL's The Z Ray (1932), Austin SMALL's The Avenging Ray (1930 asby Seamark) and one of the earliest examples of Soviet sf, Giperboloid inzhenera Garina (1926; rev 1937; trans as The Deathbox 1936; new trans of rev edn vt The Garin Death Ray 1955 USSR) by Alexei TOLSTOY. Few actually succeeded in destroying the world, although Neil BELL's The Lord of Life (1933) almost did. Criminal scientists deployed more subtle agents, too:Sax ROHMER's Fu Manchu was especially adept with exotic poisons, and biological blights were used as threats in Edgar WALLACE's The Green Rust (1919), William Le Queux's The Terror of the Air (1920) and Robert W.SERVICE's The Master of the Microbe (1926). Others, not quite so egotistical, tried to use their weapons altruistically to force peace upon the world; they included the heroes of His Wisdom the Defender (1900) by Simon NEWCOMB, Empire of the World (1910; vt Emperor of the World UK) byC.J. Cutcliffe HYNE and The Ark of the Covenant (1924; vt Ultimatum) by Victor MACCLURE. Few early writers were aware of the differences which advanced weaponry might make to the nature of warfare, and only H.G. Wells, in Anticipations (1901), realized what an appalling difference verysimple innovations like barbed wire might make. George Griffith recognized that aerial bombing would not discriminate between combatants and noncombatants, although he did not explore the political ramifications. After 1918, however, poison gases of various kinds became the majorbugbear of UK future- WAR stories, deployed to bloodcurdling effect in such stories as Shaw DESMOND's Ragnarok (1926) and Neil Bell's The Gas War of 1940 (1931 as Miles; vt Valiant Clay 1934 as NB). It is perhaps surprising that the scientific romancers' pessimism about the likelihood of the Geneva Convention being observed in the next war proved largely unjustified. Other political fantasies of the period, including Harold NICOLSON's atom-bomb story Public Faces (1932) and John GLOAG's Winter'sYouth (1934) - which features a kind of super-napalm called "radiant inflammatol"- also proved (mercifully) a little too cynical.The early pulp-sf writers took to superweapons-particularly rays - in a big way. E.E. "Doc" SMITH's The Skylark of Space (1928; 1946) features heat rays,infra-sound, ultraviolet rays and "induction rays", and an entire planet is aimed towards Earth at hyperlight speed in the Lensmen series. His contemporaries were hardly less prolific. John W. CAMPBELL Jr's "Space Rays" (1932) was so extravagant that Hugo GERNSBACK thought he must bejoking and billed the story as a "burlesque", apparently offending Campbell sufficiently to deter him from submitting to WONDER STORIESagain. In an era when fictional large-scale destruction could be achieved at the flick of a switch, an amazing example of restraint can be found in Thomas P. KELLEY's SPACE OPERA "A Million Years in the Future" (1940),which features SPACESHIPS armed with gigantic crossbows mounted on their prows. At the opposite extreme, Jack WILLIAMSON's The Legion of Space (1934; rev 1947) features the super-weapon AKKA, which obliterates wholespace fleets at the push of a button, and Edmond HAMILTON was fond of disposing of worlds and stars with a similar casual flourish. After this there seemed no further extreme available, so innovation thereafter followed more modest paths. Two standard types of personal weaponry became CLICHES, the stun-gun and the BLASTER; modern space-opera heroes oftencarry modifiable pistols usable in either way, after the fashion of STAR TREK's "phasers". 20th-century developments have contributed only minorinspiration: T.H. Maiman's discovery of the laser in 1960 merely "confirmed" what sf writers had always known about DEATH RAYS, just asHiroshima had "confirmed" what they already knew about atom bombs.WWII renewed fears about the destructive potential of war, but there was little room left for imaginative innovation, although mention must be made of the "doomsday weapon": an ultimate deterrent which, if triggered in responseto attack, will annihilate life on Earth. Alfred NOYES's The Last Man (1940; vt No Other Man 1940 US) invokes such a weapon but leaves thedestruction conveniently incomplete. US GENRE SF now began to reproduce the hysteria of earlier UK SCIENTIFIC ROMANCES in lamenting Man's propensity to make and use terrible weapons; superweapons were more often treated as ultimate horrors than as fancy toys. Notable examples of the new attitude are Bernard WOLFE's bitter black comedy on the theme of "disarmament", LIMBO (1952; vt Limbo '90 1953 UK), and James BLISH's storyabout nasty-minded ways and means of guiding missiles, "Tomb Tapper" (1956). Such stories initiated a tradition which extends through DRSTRANGELOVE: OR, HOW I LEARNED TO STOP WORRYING AND LOVE THE BOMB (1963) to such works as Marc LAIDLAW's Dad's Nuke (1985). The post-WWII years also saw the growth of a macabre interest in the subtleties of "psychological warfare", which sparked off many thrillers about"brainwashing"; the tradition is gruesomely extrapolated in Gregory BENFORD's Deeper than the Darkness (1970; rev vt as The Stars in Shroud 1978).This anxiety interrupted but never killed off either the more romanticized varieties of futuristic swashbuckling or the fantasies inspired by threats to the US citizen's constitutional right to bear weapons. A.E. VAN VOGT's Weapon Shops series of the 1940s made much of the slogan "the right to bear weapons is the right to be free". The intimacy of the relationship between HEROES and their weapons is related to the kind of simplistic power fantasy which underlies much SWORD AND SORCERY and much sf on the FANTASY borderline, but some writers, notably Charles L. HARNESS in Flight into Yesterday (1949; exp 1953; vt The Paradox Men1955), have been ingenious in inventing technological reasons (in this case that FORCE FIELDS are less opaque to slow-moving objects) for the survival in advanced societies of swordplay a la Edgar Rice BURROUGHS. Such power fantasies are, of course, reflected in the PSYCHOLOGY of theactual arms race which obsessed the USA and the USSR for nearly half a century after 1945; this is parodied in Philip K. DICK's The Zap Gun (1967). Arms-race psychology reached a real-world climax in the 1980s withthe sciencefictional SDI project, aptly dubbed "Star Wars" by those cynical about its practicability; the most respectful treatment it received may have been in David A. DRAKE's ALTERNATE-WORLD story Fortress (1987), but this text features an orbital launch facility protected bypoint defense wapons, which do not much resemble SDI proposals. The history of the US fascination with the idea of superweapons is detailed in H. Bruce FRANKLIN's War Stars: The Superweapon and the AmericanImagination (1988).Power fantasies involving "intimate weaponry" have made rapid progress in recent times. The futuristic suits of armour worn in Robert A. HEINLEIN's STARSHIP TROOPERS (1959) and the supertanks of KeithLAUMER's interesting Dinochrome Brigade series, collected as Bolo (coll of linked stories 1976; exp vt The Compleat Bolo 1990) are modest inventions compared to the more dramatic kinds of CYBORG-ization featured in Poul ANDERSON's "Kings who Die" (1962), Laumer's own A Plague of Demons (1965)and Gordon R. DICKSON's The Forever Man (1986). The relatively modest enhancements featured in the tv series The SIX MILLION DOLLAR MAN are easily adaptable to routine power fantasy, but adaptations as intrusive as that featured in Anderson's "The Pugilist" (1973) - which brings a new perspective to the phallic symbolism of weaponry - belong in a different category.Modern sf has discovered various more subtle ways to fight wars. The dependence of modern society on sophisticated technologies opens upnew opportunities for ingenious sabotage, as explored in Mack REYNOLDS's Computer War (1967) and Frederik POHL's The Cool War (1981). The ultimatedefensive technology featured in Vernor VINGE's The Peace War (1984) turns out, however, to bring only temporary respite from more destructive conflict. Laser warfare, as described in Light Raid (1989) by Connie WILLIS and Cynthia FELICE, also turns out to be less clinical and coherentthan might have been hoped, and the day of fabulously macho weapons, like the one featured in Roger McBride ALLEN's Farside Cannon (1988), is clearly by no means done. The most competent survey of the modern sciencefictional armoury is David LANGFORD's excellent War in 2080: The Future of Military Technology (1979), some of whose research wasredeployed in the novel The Space Eater (1982), a then-state-of-the-art account of weapons technology which cheerfully ranges from the most gruesomely intimate to the most hugely destructive.

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