Poul Anderson: The Best Military Science Fiction of the 20th Century

During the 1960s and 1970s, no doubt under the influence of the Vietnam War, interest in military science fiction waned. The military generally came under a cloud during those turbulent decades. One interesting exception to the rule here is the rise in those same decades of fantasy series chronicling enormous wars, most often against the power of evil. The archetype, of course, is J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. I think such works became popular for a couple of reasons: first, who was good and who was not was very explicitly defined—which was not always the case in either the real world or the more realistic forms of science fiction—and, second, the stories were set in worlds so far removed from our own as to distance the readers from the everyday mundanities of life.

Fred Saberhagen’s Berserker series of science-fiction adventure tales solved the problem of good guys and bad guys by making the enemy a fleet of robot starships programmed to root out life wherever it might be encountered (a theme also used earlier, not long after the end of World War II, by Theodore Sturgeon in “There Is No Defense”). In The Men in the Jungle , Norman Spinrad solved it by not solving it; as far as anyone can tell, there are no heroes in the story, only villains of one stripe or another—again, a motif disturbingly close to real life.

There is a certain irony in the fact that, in the 1970s, military science fiction revived not so much in book form but in the movies—irony because Hollywood, a traditionally liberal place, has not always taken kindly to soldiers and their trade. But blood and thunder have played very important roles in both the Star Wars and Star Trek sagas, not least because matters military tend to create strong blacks and whites without shades of gray, and also because they lend themselves to spectacular special effects. Written science fiction is often thought-provoking; filmed sci-fi is more often jaw-dropping. The two usually appeal to different audiences, which aficionados of the written variety sometimes forget to their peril—and frustration.

The last two decades of the twentieth century saw a revival of written military science fiction. Jerry Pournelle, a Korean War veteran, has written a number of stirring novels with strong military themes, both with Larry Niven (notably in The Mote in God’s Eye , a first-contact story, and Footfall , a fine tale of alien invasion) and by himself.

David Drake (who, like Joe W. Haldeman, saw the elephant in Vietnam) has contributed a gritty realism to the field in his future-history stories, such as Hammer’s Slammers , and, thanks to his strong background in ancient history and classics, with tales such as Ranks of Bronze and Birds of Prey .

Drake and S. M. Stirling have also collaborated on a series of novels set in the far future but based on the career of the Byzantine emperor Justinian’s great marshal, Belisarius. On his own hook, Stirling specializes in alternate histories with a strong military flavor: the Draka universe, surely as unpleasant a dystopia as has burst from anyone’s word processor; and the stories begun with Island in the Sea of Time , which drop the island of Nantucket back to 1250 B.C.E. and involve the inhabitants in military affairs up to their necks.

Lois McMaster Bujold’s series of novels, mostly based on the fragile (both in ego and in corpus) hero Miles Vorkosigan, have deservedly attracted a large following. Miles subverts hierarchies and discipline but is remarkably effective in spite of—or because of—that. His adventures also have in them a strong humorous strain not often seen in military science fiction.

Where Drake and Stirling have projected the career of an actual historical figure into the future, David Weber’s series of novels about Honor Harrington has many analogies to the fictional seafaring adventures of Horatio Hornblower set in Napoleonic times. Many fans of military science fiction are also passionate aficionados of the tales penned by C. S. Forester, Patrick O’Brian, and others who work in the small, crowded world of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. I don’t precisely know why this should be so, but that it’s so seems indisputable; it’s an enthusiasm I share myself.

One of the advantages of writing an introduction such as this is that I can also subject my readers to a two-paragraph commercial for my own work. As an escaped Byzantine historian, I’ve used Byzantium as a base for my Videssos universe, with the Time of Troubles series being based on the eventful career of the Emperor Herakleios, The Tale of Krispos on the reigns of Basil the Macedonian and John Tzimiskes (an advantage to fiction is that one can mix and match to suit oneself ), and The Videssos Cycle on the chaos surrounding the Battle of Manzikert.

Switching from fantasy to science fiction, I’ve imagined time-traveling South Africans interfering in the American Civil War in The Guns of the South , an alien invasion during World War II in the Worldwar series, and the United States and Confederate States on opposite sides of the European alliance system during the late nineteenth century and World War I in How Few Remain and the books of the Great War series.

Elizabeth Moon is a former member of the Marine Corps who has made a name for herself with both military-oriented fantasy and science fiction. Her worlds combine gritty realism and striking wit; no one else currently working in the field has a similar voice.

The Sten novels from the team of Allan Cole and Chris Bunch combine military affairs and political intrigue. The team—unfortunately no longer working together—had a striking mix of talents, Bunch having served as a member of a long-range reconnaissance patrol in Vietnam and Cole being the son of a prominent CIA official. Their hero, named for a British submachine gun of World War II vintage, is every bit as deadly as his prototype, and much less likely to go to pieces in action.

Technothrillers are vulnerable to events in the world around them. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, truly world-shattering ones became much harder to write; indeed, the entire genre suffered something of a collapse. However pleasant a much-reduced likelihood of armageddon may be for the world at large, it’s not far from hell for those who made a living with stories about such catastrophes.

Military science fiction seems less vulnerable to events in the world around it. Technothrillers, by their very nature, are limited to the near future, while military science fiction can and does span all of space and time. If the near future looks peaceful, there’s always the further future to explore—either that or a twisted past in which things went differently from the way they turned out in real history.

One area where written military science fiction differs from what vast audiences see on the silver screen is that it demands more from those who pursue it.

HIS EXCELLENCY M’KATZE UNDUMA, Ambassador of the Terrestrial Federation to the Double Kingdom, was not accustomed to being kept waiting. But as the minutes dragged into an hour, anger faded before a chill deduction.

In this bleakly clock-bound society a short delay was bad manners, even if it were unintentional. But if you kept a man of rank cooling his heels for an entire sixty minutes, you offered him an unforgivable insult. Rusch was a barbarian but he was too canny to humiliate Earth’s representative without reason.

Which bore out everything that Terrestrial Intelligence had discovered. From a drunken junior officer, weeping in his cups because Old Earth, Civilization, was going to be attacked and the campus where he had once learned and loved would be scorched to ruin by his fire guns—to the battle plans and annotations thereon, which six men had died to smuggle out of the Royal War College—and now, this degradation of the ambassador himself—everything fitted.