Wikipedia:

military science fiction

Starship Troopers by Robert A. Heinlein is a well-known example of military science fiction.
Enlarge
Starship Troopers by Robert A. Heinlein is a well-known example of military science fiction.

Military science fiction is a subgenre of science fiction where interstellar or interplanetary conflict and its armed solution (war) make up the main or partial backdrop of the story. Such war is usually shown from the point of view of a soldier. In general, a detailed depiction of conflict forms the basis of most works of military science fiction. The main characters are often part of the military chain of command.

Characteristics

Frequently, the conflict is assumed to be inevitable (humans vs. aliens, democracies vs. dictatorships, etc.), and the military approach is not questioned. (However, in a significant number of such works, the problem of ending an intractable conflict is dealt with, and in such works the conflict is often shown to have been pointless originally. Examples include David Drake's Counting the Cost, and Joe Haldeman's The Forever War.) Traditional military values (discipline, courage, etc.) are usually stressed, and the action is often described from the point of view of either a soldier or officer. Technology is generally advanced and often described in detail; however, in some stories technology is fairly static, in some cases using weapons that would be familiar to present-day soldiers, and wars are not primarily won by R&D or even logistics, but by willpower and military virtues. In other stories technological changes are central to plot development.

Another common characteristic is the use of actual historical battles or conflicts as more or less direct models for fictional situations. A few such events have been re-used often enough to become clichéd, such as the battle of Rorke's Drift or the Nika riots. Often starships are classified as in the Washington Naval Treaty of 1922: heavy and light cruisers, etc.

Thus, while the original Star Wars movies have an armed conflict as backdrop, they would not usually be considered military SF. Most Star Trek series are not part of this genre, though Deep Space Nine borrows some of the genre conventions in later seasons. Similarly, Babylon 5 is a borderline case. Space: Above and Beyond is clear military SF, but the Lensman cycle by E.E. Doc Smith is not considered so, being instead seen as Space Opera.

History

Perhaps the first works of modern military SF were H. Beam Piper's Uller Uprising (1952) (based on the events of the Sepoy Mutiny) and the same author's Lord Kalvan of Otherwhen (1965). Robert A. Heinlein's Starship Troopers (1959) is another pivotal early work of military SF, and mostly responsible for spreading this sub-genre's popularity to young readers of the time.

The start of military SF as a recognized sub-genre might be placed at the publication of Combat SF (ISBN 0-441-11531-4, edited by Gordon Dickson) in 1975. This anthology includes one of the first Hammer's Slammers stories by David Drake as well as one of the BOLO stories by Keith Laumer, and one of the Berserker stories by Fred Saberhagen. This anthology seems to have been the first time SF-stories specifically dealing with war as a subject were collected and marketed as such. Shortly afterwards, the book publication of Jerry Pournelle's The Mercenary (1977, first section published in Analog Science Fiction in 1972) and of Drake's "Slammers" series (1979) established the sub-genre as an active marketing category.

The series of anthologies under the group title There Will be War edited by Pournelle and John F. Carr (nine volumes from 1983 through 1990) helped keep the category active, and encouraged new writers to enter it.

Unbalanced_scales.svg
 The neutrality of this section is disputed.
Please see the discussion on the talk page.

Viewpoints

While military science fiction, like science fiction in general, is primarily for entertainment purposes, a number of authors have presented stories with political messages of varying types as major or minor themes of their works.

A growing tendency in some quarters of military SF is to portray democratic government with a certain level of contempt, as bloated, inefficient or even openly antagonistic to its military protectors (who as the protagonists are typically portrayed as good and noble in this type of story) and liberals as out-of-touch ivory tower academics and idealists who must invariably be protected from themselves. Some works in the genre openly admit they have been written to transport certain present-world political messages. For example, Tom Kratman's and John Ringo's "Watch on the Rhine", infamous for its plot where rejuvenated Waffen-SS personnel are used to defend Germany against an alien invasion, includes an epilogue explaining that this serves as a metaphor for the "ruthlessness" that, according to the authors, must be brought out in today's Western civilisation to successfully win an ongoing global conflict.[citation needed]

Military SF has also been and continues to be written from liberal viewpoints and works like Joe Haldeman's The Forever War, which indirectly criticizes the military, are not unknown.

David Drake, not in any way an anti-military author, has often written of the horrors and futility of war. He has said, in the afterwords of several of his "Slammers" books, that one of his reasons for writing is to educate those people who have not experienced war, but who might have to make the decision to start or support a war (as policy makers or as voters) about what war is really like, and what the powers and limits of the military as a tool of policy are.

In more recent books, David Weber's Honor Harrington series, while previously featuring righteous heroes triumphing over despicable villains, now centers on an unnecessary war between two groups of positive characters.

While much military SF is purely entertainment, and caters to a similar audience as historical and modern military novels, some authors manage to work within the genre conventions while posing interesting new questions. An example is Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game, where children are trained from a young age to fight for humanity.

Authors

Defining authors of the genre include:

Many current military SF books are published by Baen Books.

Examples

Military science fiction is seen in an array of media, including books, movies, TV and anime, and games.

Books

Movies, TV and Anime

Video Games

  • BattleTech universe (also known as the MechWarrior universe), started as a wargame, now is the setting of more than seventy books,
  • Command & Conquer series of games features the long spanning conflict between GDI and Nod, two factions fighting for control of Earth. The Red Alert universe features the wars between the Allies and Soviets.
  • Descent: FreeSpace series of space-combat videogames.
  • Gears of War, follows the story of a group of humans on a planet called Sera trying to survive a war with underground monsters known as Locusts.
  • Halo series of videogames and books, chronicling the adventures of the results of a military experiment (Master Chief John-117) as he attempts to save the human race from the overzealous Covenant.
  • Homeworld, a series of three-dimensional RTS and space-combat videogames.
  • I-War (Independence War), a space combat game detailing a fictional human conflict between Earth military and colonial guerrillas in a realistic fashion. The player is a captain commanding a 162 meter corvette with a full crew.
  • Nintendo Wars is a turn based tactical series that takes place in a fictional planet called Wars World.
  • Planetside is an MMOFPS which the player can take sides with one of the three empires in the game.
  • StarCraft is a RTS computer and Nintendo 64 game from Blizzard Entertainment revolving around three races, human Terran, insectoid Zerg, and humanoid Protoss. It has spawned many games and books.
  • The Star Wars universe has spawned a multitude of military-based games.
  • Supreme Commander, the spiritual successor to Chris Taylor's Total Annihilation, centers around the futuristic robotic armies of the United Earth Federation, the Aeon Illuminate, and the Cybran Nation.
  • Total Annihilation is a highly unique RTS game involving the survivors of two human armies (one using mass cloning, the other having moved their consciousness to machines) who have been battling so long they have devastated much of the galaxy and no longer even truly remember why they fight. It is one of the few entries of the genre to create a tangible sense of pointless conflict on an epic scale, the protagonists having started the war in trying to preserve their humanity, have gone on to ultimately destroy the last vestiges of it instead.
  • Warhammer 40,000 universe, started as a wargame, and spawned many comics and books (Including the mentioned Gaunt's Ghosts series), and more recently, videogames.
  • Warzone 2100 is a post-nuclear war science fiction RTS game set on earth, where the noble survivor group of the 'Project' must gradually recover lost technology against several increasingly powerful fascist military survivor groups (although the political nature of the Project is not actually known and may be fascistic in some ways itself).
  • Wing Commander universe, started as a game detailing the fictional conflict between humans and a race of cat-like aliens, and spawned several books, sequels/games, a movie, and a cartoon series.

See also


This entry is from Wikipedia, the leading user-contributed encyclopedia. It may not have been reviewed by professional editors (see full disclaimer)

 
 
 

Join the WikiAnswers Q&A community. Post a question or answer questions about "military science fiction" at WikiAnswers.

 

Copyrights:

Wikipedia. This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Military science fiction".  Read more

Search for answers directly from your browser with the FREE Answers.com Toolbar!  
Click here to download now. 

Get Answers your way! Check out all our free tools and products.

On this page:   E-mail   print Print  Link  

 

Keep Reading

Mentioned In:

 |  More >More >
 

Do you have the answers?