Sense of Wonder: A Century of Science Fiction (381 page)

First published in
There Will Be War
, 1982

I

I used to be a monk, but gave it over

Before books and prayer and studies cooled my blood.

And joined with Richard as a mercenary soldier.

(No Richard that you’ve heard of, just

A man who’d bought a title for his name).

And it was in his service I met Saul.

The first day of my service I liked Saul;

His easy humor quickly won me over.

He admitted Saul was not his name;

He’d taken up another name for blood.

(So had I—my fighting name was just

(A word we use at home for private soldier.)

I felt at home as mercenary soldier.

I liked the company of men like Saul.

(Though most of Richard’s men were just

(Fighting for the bounty when it’s over.)

I loved the clash of weapons, splashing blood—

I lived the meager promise of my name.

Saul promised that he’d tell me his real name

When he was through with playing as a soldier.

(I said the same; we took an oath in blood.)

But I would never know him but as Saul;

He’d die before the long campaign was over,

Dying for a cause that was not just.

Only fools require a cause that’s just,

Fools and children out to make a name.

Now I’ve had sixty years to think it over

(Sixty years of being no one’s soldier).

Sixty years since broadsword opened Saul

And splashed my body with his steaming blood.

But damn! we lived for bodies and for blood.

The reek of dead men rotting, it was just

A sweet perfume for those like me and Saul.

(My peaceful language doesn’t have a name

(For lewd delight in going off to soldier.)

It hurts my heart sometimes to know it’s over.

My heart was hard as stone when it was over;

When finally I’d had my fill of blood.

(And knew I was too old to be a soldier.)

Nothing left for me to do but just

Go back home and make myself a name

In ways of peace, forgetting war and Saul.

In ways of blood he made himself a name

(Though he was just a mercenary soldier)—

I loved Saul before it all was over.

II

A mercenary soldier has no future;

Some say his way of life is hardly human.

And yet, he has his own small bloody world

(Part aches and sores and wrappings soaking blood,

(Partly fear and glory grown familiar)

Confined within a shiny fence of swords.

But how I learned to love to fence with swords!

Another world, my homely past and future—

Once steel and eye and wrist became familiar

With each other, then that steel was almost human

(With an altogether human taste for blood).

I felt that sword and I could take the world.

I felt that Saul and I could take the world:

Take the whole world hostage with our swords.

The bond we felt was stronger than mere blood

(Though I can see with hindsight in the future

(The bond we felt was something only human:

(A need for love when death becomes familiar.)

We were wizards, and death was our familiar;

Our swords held all the magic in the world.

(Richard thought it almost wasn’t human,

(The speed with which we parried others’ swords,

(Forever end another’s petty future.)

Never scratched, though always steeped in blood.

Ambushed in a tavern, fighting ankle-deep in blood,

Fighting back-to-back in ways familiar.

Saul slipped: lost his footing and his future.

Broad blade hammered down and sent him from this world.

In angry grief I killed that one, then all the other swords;

Then locked the door and murdered every human.

No choice, but to murder every human.

No one in that tavern was a stranger to blood.

(To those who live with pikes and slashing swords,

(The inner parts of men become familiar.)

Saul’s vitals looked like nothing in this world:

I had to kill them all to save my future.

Saul’s vitals were not human, but familiar:

He never told me he was from another world:

I never told him I was from his future.

Author’s Note

The sestina is an ingenious, intricate form of verse that originated in France around the twelfth century, percolated into Italy, and from there was appropriated by the English. At first glance, it looks like a rather arbitrary logjam, sort of a hybrid of poetry with linear algebra, but it does have a special charm.

The form calls for six stanzas of six lines each, followed by a three-line envoi. The lines don’t rhyme, but they give a sort of illusion of rhyming, by forced repetition. The last words of the first six lines provide the last words of every subsequent line, by a strict system of inside-out rotation. (If the last words of the first stanza are 1-2-3-4-5-6, then the last words of the second are

6-1-5-2-4-3; the third, 3-1-4-1-2-5, and so forth.
Clara?
The envoi ought to have all six words crammed into its three lines, but the writer is allowed a certain amount of latitude with that, and I’ve taken it.)

The result, in English at least, is a sort of a chant, which is one of two reasons the form is appropriate for an entertainment like “Saul’s Death.”

* * * *

“Hero” Copyright © 1972 by Joe W. Haldeman.

“Saul’s Death: Two Setinas” Copyright © 1982 by Joe W. Haldeman.

Since the siege and the assault was ceased at Troy…writers have created military science fiction. Military science fiction is that branch of the art that focuses on war, on soldiers, and on military values: Honor, loyalty, and faith in one’s comrades in arms.

Whether we count Caesar’s
Gallic Commentaries
as military science fiction or military fantasy, whatever we may think about the Middle English Metrical romances (e.g.
Octavian
; see also various Breton
lais
by Marie de France concerning the adventures of assorted knights; also Malory’s stories of King Arthur, the poem of El Cid, and the Song of Roland, where the protagonists, all of them military characters, fight assorted menaces both human and supernatural), we can skip lightly over several thousand years of literature to alight in the mid-nineteenth century, when science fiction, as a distinct genre, was being forged. The military venue is an obvious one for literature in general: Stories require conflict, and wars are conflict crystalized. When science fiction came on the scene, it fell upon the military venue with cries of joy.

It’s always tricky to call something the “first” in its category. Scholars don’t agree on what was the first novel, let alone what was the first science fiction novel. Therefore, let me say that an early military science fiction novel, if not the first, belonged to the sub-subgenre, “technothriller.” (It was, indeed a sub genre, for it dealt with a sub.) Twenty Thousand Leagues Beneath the Seas, by Jules Verne (1870), at the time it was written was what you could call very-near-future science fiction. It incorporated the latest understanding of oceanography, submersible vessels, and the newly invented self-contained underwater breathing apparatus. And it was military, for the submarine, the Nautilus, under the command of the mysterious Captain Nemo (whose name is a shout-out to that example of proto-military-SF, Homer’s Odyssey) was able to attack the very latest British warships. And if Verne took the technology in question a little further than it actually existed at the time, that extrapolation only places the novel more firmly in the realm of science fiction.

The next year saw the next leap in military science fiction. The Invasion Novel had existed as a genre in Europe since the beginning of the century, with titles like
The Invasion of England
(1803) and
The Armed Briton
(1806). Invasion Novels used current advances in military science (e.g. balloons; breech-loading artillery) to show how the defenses of assorted countries were inadequate to guard against aggression on the part of their historic enemies.

In spring of 1871, Blackwood’s Magazine published a novel serialized in three parts, launching the next phase of military science fiction, the Future War. The novel was
The Battle of Dorking
:
Reminiscences of a Volunteer,
by George Chesney. Chesney was an army man, a major of engineers, who had himself been wounded in the Indian Mutiny.

The Battle of Dorking
purports to be a reminiscence set some fifty years in the future, telling the story of the defeat of an unprepared England by a nameless (but German-speaking) invader. The novel’s best-seller status launched a fleet of imitators.

One of the later future war books is out-and-out science fiction:
The War of the Worlds
(1898) by H. G. Wells.
The War of the Worlds
closely follows
The Battle of Dorking
in its scenes and incidents. But the foe this time is not an unnamed European power using actual, if advanced, weapons. The enemy here are mollusklike Martians with mechanical tripod fighting machines armed with heat rays, against which the British Empire is helpless. One character in
The War of the Worlds
, an artilleryman, brings this novel into the sub-genre of military science fiction. The artilleryman proposes a guerilla war while humans attempt to duplicate the Martians’ weapons.

The War of the Worlds
proved immensely popular and long-lived. It was reprinted several times. When it was remade as a radio drama by Orson Welles in 1938, the story caused widespread panic in the United States. Robert Heinlein’s
The Puppet Masters
(1951), another invasion novel, closely followed
The War of the Worlds
(right the way down to the invaders being ultimately overcome by ordinary human disease), just as
The War of the Worlds
had closely followed
The Battle of Dorking.

Over in Japan, Oshikawa Shunrô wrote
Kaitei Gunkan (1900), in which a Japanese Naval officer builds the eponymous Submarine Battleship with which he fights pirates and, in the sequels, a future-historical war against the Russians. The submarine of the novels, and its tactics, reflect the earlier works by Verne.

Although the purpose of science fiction (in so far as it has a purpose at all) is not predicting the future, Verne and Oshikawa correctly predicted the vulnerability of surface ships to submarines, while Wells predicted the laser ray, poison gas, armored fighting vehicles (“The Land Ironclads,” 1903), and the atomic bomb (“The World Set Free,” 1914).

Then (in 1914 and the decades after) came World War One, the invention of science fiction as a separate genre, the rise of the pulp magazines, the Great Depression, and World War II.

The Galactic Patrol appeared in the novel
Triplanetary
by E. E. Smith (serialized in the pulp magazine
Amazing Stories
in 1934). The story revolves around the planets Earth, Mars, and Venus, which have just fought a successful war against the inhabitants of Jupiter. Other plot elements involve a millennia-long war between extra-human intelligences that are carrying out selective breeding on Earth to foster their own ends. The Patrol is a combination military/police force/peacekeeping organization. The novel
Galactic Patrol
(a sequel to
Triplanetary
) was serialized in six parts in
Astounding
magazine in 1937. The Galactic Patrolmen, as they fight an intergalactic crime syndicate called the Boskone, personify military virtues. They continued to have adventures in further novels involving the Lensmen, written by Smith both before and after World War II.

When World War II ended, the great age of Military Science Fiction began.

In 1948, former Naval officer Robert Heinlein published
Space Cadet
, a school adventure set in a military academy for a service that covered the same three planets as the Galactic Patrol. These planets were the swampy Venus, the arid Mars (home of a former advanced civilization), and Earth. Intelligent life on Mars was, or had been, mainstream scientific thought, with Percival Lowell championing the canals on Mars. And Venus was the same size as Earth and was known to have permanent cloud cover, which suggested a habitat not unlike Earth’s own Age of Dinosaurs. The plot possibilities were endless.

As the post-World War Two ere gave way to the Cold War, military science fiction continued to ramp up. While it would be simplistic to say that the military science fiction of those decades was all about the Cold War, all novels are the products of their times. Science fiction is no different; SF novels are about their presents, not (despite the Gernsback Delusion) educating the public or predicting the future.

The Cold War pitted the United States and its allies against the Soviet Union and its allies, two empires that did not dare to go to war directly against one another, and so carried out war by other means. Those sometimes included proxy wars, such as those in Korea, Vietnam, Soviet-era Afghanistan, and Grenada.

To generalize a bit more: Two of the basic plots in military science fiction are
“If This Goes On”
and
“The Man Who Learned Better
.
”
Two of the basic viewpoint characters are The Young Recruit and the Old Veteran. And the military life is highly mannered, which provides room for social commentary.

Since
The Battle of Dorking
, works of military SF had been cautionary tales, warnings of the dangers of unpreparedness or of the horrors of war. Now they became meditations on current politics.

With World War Two recently over, veterans began to write novels. And with wide-spread paperback publication and a public hungry for novels, so many examples of military SF were produced that it grows difficult to present them all. Where in the nineteenth century we see one here, and a decade later another one there, in the late fifties and later we come to sorting and classification problems; many fine examples of the genre will be left out, or touched on only briefly.

British Royal Air Force veteran Eric Frank Russell published two comic military SF novels in 1958:
Wasp
and
The Space Willies
. Set during an interstellar war against a non-human—but still humanoid—foe, the novels can be read as textbooks on unconventional/asymmetrical warfare. The protagonists in both novels are military men in the midst of a hot war.

Robert Heinlein was a military veteran, a Naval Academy graduate, though he had only seen peacetime service before being invalided out with tuberculosis. But his experience in the Academy brought authority to his voice in Space Cadet, and the time he’d spent at sea brought experience to the feeling of being locked up in an iron box for months on end; whether that box is called a ship or a space-ship. Those who want an understanding of Heinlein’s spaceships and computers might want to visit one of the WWII-era museum ships that you can find in various places (e.g. Battleship Cove, Fall River MA). As an earlier writer, Heinlein was influential on later authors in the sub-genre.

Heinlein also wrote one of the most influential military SF books: In 1959 he published
Starship Soldier
, serialized in two issues of
The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction
, then released as a novel under the title
Starship Trooper
s. In
Starship Troopers
, a young man rebels against his family and enlists in the infantry, then takes part in an interstellar war against an implacable and unknowable foe, the inhuman Bugs. The story is mostly told in flashbacks as the recruit goes through high school, then through boot camp, then out into space. Along the way he’s treated to many long philosophical discussions on the meanings of virtue, honor, and civic duty. And here we see the purest form of military SF: the viewpoint character is a military member, often against a wartime setting, and military values are stressed.

Science fiction, like other art, isn’t just in dialog with the society in which it is created; it is in dialog with the other works in the field. The heritage of Starship Troopers includes Harry Harrison’s Bill, the Galactic Hero (1965), Joe Haldeman’s The Forever War (1974), John Steakley’s Armor (1984), and John Scalzi’s Old Man’s War (2005.)

Joe Haldeman was a Vietnam veteran who had seen combat, and been wounded, in Southeast Asia. In
The Forever War
, the protagonist becomes alienated from his own society due to the time dilation effects of light-speed travel to and from the battlefields; he eventually learns that the entire war was a mistake based on a misunderstanding.

In 1960 Keith Laumer, who had seen service in the US Army Air Corps in Europe during WWII, introduced cybernetic tanks called “Bolos,” fearsome and nearly invincible fighting machines with advanced artificial intelligence. The Bolos embody military values: They do not question their orders, they do not fear for their lives, and they guard the weak against the strong. The first Bolo appeared in the short story “Combat Unit” in
The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction
(1960). A typical Bolo story is “A Relic of War” (
Analog
, 1969): A Bolo tank is a war memorial in a small town. It is capable of lighting cigars on request. However, a threat develops; an attack by a leftover unit from the long-forgotten war in which the Bolo served. The tank reawakens to service, and defeats the enemy. For its pains, the tank is deactivated—its artificial intelligence killed—by a representative of its own side; the old tank is too dangerous to keep around.

More cybernetic intelligences followed. Fred Saberhagen, an Air Force veteran from the Korean war, wrote the Berserker series (first short story, “Fortress Ship” (1963) in If magazine). The Berserkers were implacable and incomprehensible fighting machines, left over from another war in another galaxy, their alien creators long-since dead. The berserkers, with their singleminded mission to destroy all sapient life, had drifted between the stars for millennia, and now had come to the Milky Way galaxy, home to a variety of species from various star systems living together in peace. And among the sapient species of the Milky Way galaxy, only earth-descended men were genetically aggressive enough to take them on, to fight against the robots to save all life.