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

HERE AT THE DAWN of the third millennium C.E., we don’t like to think about actually fighting wars. We hope we’ve outgrown them. For more than half a century, we’ve had the chance to wreck our civilization, and we haven’t taken it. This says something good about us as a species, maybe even something surprisingly good. Perhaps—just perhaps—we aren’t really so stupid as we often give signs of being.

Mankind has always hated war. And yet, it has always fascinated us, too. As long as we’ve written, we’ve written about it. This is quite literally true. The Epic of Gilgamesh goes back to the earliest days of our literacy and is, among other things, the story of warfare. The Iliad , the foundation stone of all Greek literature, centers on the siege of Troy and the great struggle between Akhilleus and Hektor. The Aeneid , Beowulf , the Norse sagas, the Chanson de Roland …all stories of battle, of warriors. And we’re still writing fiction about war, in and out of science fiction, to this day.

Why?

For the two cents it’s worth, here’s my answer. Fiction is about character under stress. What we do when the heat is on reveals far more about us than how we behave in ordinary times. What comes close to putting so much stress on the character, fictional or otherwise, as nearly getting killed? As Samuel Johnson said, “When a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.”

Well, I admit there is one other stress that does the same thing: love. And, of course, what passes between man and woman (or, less often, between man and man or between woman and woman) is the other enduringly popular theme of fiction.

And to this mix science fiction adds a couple of other interesting riffs: gadgetry as interesting as the writer can come up with and, sometimes, alien beings also as interesting as the writer can likewise. The grand-daddy of stories of this type, H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds , actually saw print in 1898, but since it set the stage for so much that came afterward, I don’t see how I can possibly neglect mentioning it here.

Wells was far from the only author interested in the effects of the Industrial Revolution on warfare yet to come. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, there was, in fact, a small boom in what we would now call technothrillers, stories examining near-future wars with emphasis on the newfangled machines that would make it different from anything that had gone before: ancestors of Tom Clancy, one might say. A fair number of these tales are collected in a fascinating volume called The Tale of the Next Great War, 1871–1914 , edited by I. F. Clarke. In 1907, in his story “The Trenches,” a British army officer, Capt. C. E. Vickers, foretold the invention of the tank. His colleague, Major (later Major General) Sir Ernest Swinton—also a writer of such tales—must surely have seen this piece; when World War I broke out, he was one of the people who helped devise the actual armored fighting vehicle. Here fiction may well have influenced later fact. Others of that period who worked in this subgenre include Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Jack London, and A. A. Milne, who is better known—and deservedly so—for Winnie-the-Pooh than for tales such as his 1909 story “The Secret of the Army Aeroplane.”

Drawing a hard and fast line between technothrillers and science fiction proper has never been easy, and probably never will be. The one I’d try to make is that technothrillers tend to be interested in gadgetry for its own sake, while science fiction examines not only the machinery but its influence on the society that’s invented it. And if people are now lining up to tear me rhetorical limb from limb, well, so be it.

After the experience of World War I, far fewer people were interested in predicting what a second world war might be like. The short answer— dreadful —seemed obvious to everyone: and, indeed, everyone was right. Instead, conflicts set in distant times and against strange aliens took pride of place for a while. John W. Campbell, later the tremendously influential editor of Astounding and its later incarnation, Analog, was one of the champions of this invent a weapon today, mass produce it tomorrow, and use it to beat the enemy the day after school of writing.

A writer who stuck closer to home, and one whose influence on the entire field of science fiction was also incalculably large, was Robert A. Heinlein. His novellas “If This Goes On…” and “Solution Unsatisfactory” and his novel Sixth Column , all written before the American entry into World War II ( Sixth Column springing in part from a Campbell idea), remain readable—and in print—today, while so much of the fiction of two generations ago has fallen by the wayside. “Solution Unsatisfactory” is an early and remarkably prescient attempt to define a problem that has plagued us ever since: How do you deal with the specter of atomic weaponry? The solutions we have worked out are as unsatisfactory as the one Heinlein proposed—but, as I said before, so far we’ve been both smarter and luckier than we might have been. As a graduate of the Naval Academy, Heinlein spoke with peculiar authority on matters military.

The brute fact of the atomic bomb hit popular consciousness hard after 1945. Nuclear war and its aftermath became a common theme in science fiction. Two early examples were Poul Anderson’s stories later collected in the paste-up novel Twilight World , and those of Henry Kuttner collected as Mutant . Anderson in particular would go on to have a long and amazingly successful career, frequently revisiting military themes in a variety of contexts: most often in his future history peopled by such swashbucklers as Nicholas van Rijn and Dominic Flandry.

Another writer who did likewise was H. Beam Piper, till his unfortunate and premature death in the mid 1960s. His series of paratime stories of alternate history, particularly his fine last work Lord Kalvan of Otherwhen , revolve around matters military. So does the elaborate future history he built up, including such novels as The Cosmic Computer and Space Viking , which combines themes from medieval European warfare and the rise of Hitler in a most striking way.

Heinlein, of course, did not disappear after the war, either. In his juvenile novels (what would now be known as YAs), such as Between Planets , Space Cadet , Citizen of the Galaxy , and Red Planet , military themes either dominate or play a strong subordinate role. And in Starship Troopers , he produced a novel of military fiction that remains intensely controversial more than forty years after its publication, was made into an extraordinarily bad movie, and spawned at least two fine novels of direct rebuttal, Gordon R. Dickson’s Soldier, Ask Not and Joe W. Haldeman’s The Forever War : no mean feat.

Another work from about the same period that should not pass unmentioned is Christopher Anvil’s novella “Pandora’s Planet,” later expanded into a novel of the same name. Anvil, most often published in Astounding and Analog , took a contrarian, sardonic, and often very funny look at things, and “Pandora’s Planet” shows him at the top of his form, with bumbling invading aliens trying to deal with humans who are both smarter than they are and, except for lacking starships, more technologically advanced, too.