{"id":47,"date":"2002-11-13T09:20:00","date_gmt":"2002-11-13T14:20:00","guid":{"rendered":"\/?p=47"},"modified":"2002-11-13T09:20:00","modified_gmt":"2002-11-13T14:20:00","slug":"the-charms-and-terrors-of-military-sf","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=47","title":{"rendered":"The Charms and Terrors of Military SF"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I took some heat recently for describing some of Jerry Pournelle&#8217;s<br \/>\nSF as &#8220;conservative\/militarist power fantasies&#8221;.  Pournelle uttered a<br \/>\nrather sniffy comment about this on his blog; the only substance I<br \/>\ncould extract from it was that Pournelle thought his lifelong friend<br \/>\nRobert Heinlein was caught between a developing libertarian philosophy<br \/>\nand his patriotic instincts.  I can hardly argue that point, since I<br \/>\ncompletely agree with it; that tension is a central issue in almost<br \/>\neveything Heinlein ever wrote.<\/p>\n<p>The differences between Heinlein&#8217;s and Pournelle&#8217;s military SF are<br \/>\nnot trivial &mdash; they are both esthetically and morally important.<br \/>\nMore generally, the soldiers in military SF express a wide range<br \/>\nof different theories about the relationship between soldier,<br \/>\nsociety, and citizen.  These theories reward some examination.<\/p>\n<p>First, let&#8217;s consider representative examples: Jerry Pournelle&#8217;s<br \/>\nnovels of Falkenberg&#8217;s Legion, on the one hand, and Heinlein&#8217;s<br \/>\n<cite>Starship Troopers<\/cite> on the other.<\/p>\n<p>The difference between Heinlein and Pournelle starts with the fact<br \/>\nthat Pournelle could write about a cold-blooded mass murder of human<br \/>\nbeings by human beings, performed in the name of political order,<br \/>\napprovingly &mdash; and did.<\/p>\n<p>But the massacre was only possible because Falkenberg&#8217;s Legion and<br \/>\nHeinlein&#8217;s Mobile Infantry have very different relationships with the<br \/>\nsociety around them. Heinlein&#8217;s troops are integrated with the society<br \/>\nin which they live.  They study history and moral philosophy; they are<br \/>\ncitizen-soldiers.  Johnnie Rico has doubts, hesitations, humanity.<br \/>\nOne can&#8217;t imagine giving him orders to open fire on a stadium-full of<br \/>\ncivilians as does Falkenberg.<\/p>\n<p>Pournelle&#8217;s soldiers, on the other hand, have no society but their<br \/>\nunit and no moral direction other than that of the men on horseback<br \/>\nwho lead them.  Falkenberg is a perfect embodiment of military<br \/>\n<em>Fuhrerprinzip<\/em>, remote even from his own men, a creepy and<br \/>\nopaque character who is not successfully humanized by an implausible<br \/>\nromance near the end of the sequence.  The Falkenberg books end with<br \/>\nhis men elevating an emperor, Prince Lysander who we are all supposed<br \/>\nto trust because he is such a beau ideal.  Two thousand years of<br \/>\nhard-won lessons about the maintenance of liberty are thrown away<br \/>\nlike so much trash.<\/p>\n<p>In fact, the underlying message here is pretty close to that of<br \/>\nclassical fascism. It, too, responds to social decay with a cult of<br \/>\nthe redeeming absolute leader.  To be fair, the Falkenberg novels<br \/>\nprobably do not depict Pournelle&#8217;s idea of an ideal society, but they<br \/>\nare hardly less damning if we consider them as a cautionary tale.<br \/>\n&#8220;Straighten up, kids, or the hero-soldiers in Nemourlon are going to<br \/>\nhave to get medieval on your buttocks and install a Glorious Leader.&#8221;<br \/>\nPournelle&#8217;s values are revealed by the way that he repeatedly posits<br \/>\nsituations in which the truncheon of authority is the only solution.<br \/>\nAll tyrants plead necessity.<\/p>\n<p>Even so, Falkenberg&#8217;s men are paragons compared to the soldiers in<br \/>\nDavid Drake&#8217;s military fiction.  In the <cite>Hammer&#8217;s Slammers<\/cite><br \/>\nbooks and elsewhere we get violence with no politico-ethical nuances<br \/>\nattached to it all.  &#8220;Carnography&#8221; is the word for this stuff,<br \/>\npure-quill violence porn that goes straight for the thalamus. There&#8217;s<br \/>\nboatloads of it out there, too; the <em>Starfist<\/em> sequence by<br \/>\nSherman and Cragg is a recent example.  Jim Baen sells a lot of it<br \/>\n(and, thankfully, uses the profits to subsidize reprinting the Golden<br \/>\nAge midlist).<\/p>\n<p>The best-written military SF, on the other hand, tends to be more<br \/>\nlike Heinlein&#8217;s &mdash; the fact that it addresses ethical questions<br \/>\nabout organized violence (and tries to come up with answers one might<br \/>\nactually be more willing to live with than Pournelle&#8217;s quasi-fascism<br \/>\nor Drake&#8217;s brutal anomie) is part of its appeal.  Often (as in<br \/>\nHeinlein&#8217;s <cite>Space Cadet<\/cite> or the early volumes in Lois<br \/>\nBujold&#8217;s superb Miles Vorkosigan novels) such stories include elements<br \/>\nof <em>bildungsroman<\/em>.<\/p>\n<p>The <cite>Sten<\/cite> sequence by Allan Cole and Chris Bunch was<br \/>\nboth a loving tribute to and (in the end) a brutal deconstruction of<br \/>\nthis kind of story.  It&#8217;s full of the building-character-at-boot-camp<br \/>\nscenes that are a staple of the subgenre; Sten&#8217;s career is carefully<br \/>\ndesigned to rationalize as many of these as possible. But the Eternal<br \/>\nEmperor, originally a benevolent if quirky paternal figure who earns<br \/>\nSten&#8217;s loyalty, goes genocidally mad.  In the end, soldier Sten must<br \/>\nrebel against the system that made him what he is.<\/p>\n<p>Cole &amp; Bunch tip their hand in an afterword to the last book,<br \/>\nnot that any reader with more perception than a brick could have<br \/>\nmissed it.  They wrote <cite>Sten<\/cite> to show where fascism leads<br \/>\nand as a protest against SF&#8217;s fascination with absolute power and the<br \/>\nsimplifications of military life.  Bujold winds up making the same<br \/>\npoint in a subtler way; the temptations of power and arrogance are a<br \/>\nconstant, soul-draining strain on Miles&#8217;s father Aral, and Miles<br \/>\neventually destroys his own career through one of those<br \/>\ntemptations<\/p>\n<p>Heinlein, a U.S naval officer who loved the military and seems to<br \/>\nhave always remembered his time at Annapolis as the best years of his<br \/>\nlife, fully understood that the highest duty of a soldier may be not<br \/>\nmerely to give his life but to reject all the claims of military<br \/>\nculture and loyalty.  His elegiac <cite>The Long Watch<\/cite> makes<br \/>\nthis point very clear.  You&#8217;ll seek an equivalent in vain anywhere in<br \/>\nPournelle or Drake or their many imitators &mdash; but consider<br \/>\nBujold&#8217;s <cite>The Vor Game<\/cite>, in which Miles&#8217;s resistance to<br \/>\nGeneral Metzov&#8217;s orders for a massacre is the pivotal moment at which<br \/>\nhe becomes a man.<\/p>\n<p>Bujold&#8217;s point is stronger because, unlike Ezra Dahlquist in<br \/>\n<cite>The Long Watch<\/cite> or the citizen-soldiers in <cite>Starship<br \/>\nTroopers<\/cite>, Miles is not a civilian serving a hitch. He is the<br \/>\nEmperor&#8217;s cousin, a member of a military caste; his place in<br \/>\nBarrayaran society is <em>defined<\/em> by the expectations of military<br \/>\nservice.  What gives his moment of decision its power is that in refusing<br \/>\nto commit an atrocity, he is not merely risking his life but giving up<br \/>\nhis dreams.<\/p>\n<p>Falkenberg and Admiral Lermontov have a dream, too.  The difference<br \/>\nis that where Ezra Dahlquist and Miles Vorkosigan sacrifice themselves<br \/>\nfor what they believe, Pournelle&#8217;s &#8220;heroes&#8221; sacrifice others.  Miles&#8217;s<br \/>\nand Dahlquist&#8217;s futures are defined by refusal of an order to do evil,<br \/>\nFalkenberg&#8217;s by the slaughter of <em>untermenschen<\/em>.<\/p>\n<p>This is a difference that makes a difference.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/enetation.co.uk\/comments.php?user=esr&amp;commentid=84479572\">Blogspot omments<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I took some heat recently for describing some of Jerry Pournelle&#8217;s SF as &#8220;conservative\/militarist power fantasies&#8221;. Pournelle uttered a rather sniffy comment about this on his blog; the only substance I could extract from it was that Pournelle thought his lifelong friend Robert Heinlein was caught between a developing libertarian philosophy and his patriotic instincts.&hellip; <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=47\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">The Charms and Terrors of Military SF<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-47","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-science-fiction","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=47"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=47"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=47"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=47"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}