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.

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.