The Charms and Terrors of Military SF
<p>I took some heat recently for describing some of Jerry Pournelle&#8217;s<br />
SF as &#8220;conservative/militarist power fantasies&#8221;.  Pournelle uttered a<br />
rather sniffy comment about this on his blog; the only substance I<br />
could extract from it was that Pournelle thought his lifelong friend<br />
Robert Heinlein was caught between a developing libertarian philosophy<br />
and his patriotic instincts.  I can hardly argue that point, since I<br />
completely agree with it; that tension is a central issue in almost<br />
eveything Heinlein ever wrote.</p>
<p>The differences between Heinlein&#8217;s and Pournelle&#8217;s military SF are<br />
not trivial &mdash; they are both esthetically and morally important.<br />
More generally, the soldiers in military SF express a wide range<br />
of different theories about the relationship between soldier,<br />
society, and citizen.  These theories reward some examination.</p>
<p>First, let&#8217;s consider representative examples: Jerry Pournelle&#8217;s<br />
novels of Falkenberg&#8217;s Legion, on the one hand, and Heinlein&#8217;s<br />
<cite>Starship Troopers</cite> on the other.</p>
<p>The difference between Heinlein and Pournelle starts with the fact<br />
that Pournelle could write about a cold-blooded mass murder of human<br />
beings by human beings, performed in the name of political order,<br />
approvingly &mdash; and did.</p>
<p>But the massacre was only possible because Falkenberg&#8217;s Legion and<br />
Heinlein&#8217;s Mobile Infantry have very different relationships with the<br />
society around them. Heinlein&#8217;s troops are integrated with the society<br />
in which they live.  They study history and moral philosophy; they are<br />
citizen-soldiers.  Johnnie Rico has doubts, hesitations, humanity.<br />
One can&#8217;t imagine giving him orders to open fire on a stadium-full of<br />
civilians as does Falkenberg.</p>
<p>Pournelle&#8217;s soldiers, on the other hand, have no society but their<br />
unit and no moral direction other than that of the men on horseback<br />
who lead them.  Falkenberg is a perfect embodiment of military<br />
<em>Fuhrerprinzip</em>, remote even from his own men, a creepy and<br />
opaque character who is not successfully humanized by an implausible<br />
romance near the end of the sequence.  The Falkenberg books end with<br />
his men elevating an emperor, Prince Lysander who we are all supposed<br />
to trust because he is such a beau ideal.  Two thousand years of<br />
hard-won lessons about the maintenance of liberty are thrown away<br />
like so much trash.</p>
<p>In fact, the underlying message here is pretty close to that of<br />
classical fascism. It, too, responds to social decay with a cult of<br />
the redeeming absolute leader.  To be fair, the Falkenberg novels<br />
probably do not depict Pournelle&#8217;s idea of an ideal society, but they<br />
are hardly less damning if we consider them as a cautionary tale.<br />
&#8220;Straighten up, kids, or the hero-soldiers in Nemourlon are going to<br />
have to get medieval on your buttocks and install a Glorious Leader.&#8221;<br />
Pournelle&#8217;s values are revealed by the way that he repeatedly posits<br />
situations in which the truncheon of authority is the only solution.<br />
All tyrants plead necessity.</p>
<p>Even so, Falkenberg&#8217;s men are paragons compared to the soldiers in<br />
David Drake&#8217;s military fiction.  In the <cite>Hammer&#8217;s Slammers</cite><br />
books and elsewhere we get violence with no politico-ethical nuances<br />
attached to it all.  &#8220;Carnography&#8221; is the word for this stuff,<br />
pure-quill violence porn that goes straight for the thalamus. There&#8217;s<br />
boatloads of it out there, too; the <em>Starfist</em> sequence by<br />
Sherman and Cragg is a recent example.  Jim Baen sells a lot of it<br />
(and, thankfully, uses the profits to subsidize reprinting the Golden<br />
Age midlist).</p>
<p>The best-written military SF, on the other hand, tends to be more<br />
like Heinlein&#8217;s &mdash; the fact that it addresses ethical questions<br />
about organized violence (and tries to come up with answers one might<br />
actually be more willing to live with than Pournelle&#8217;s quasi-fascism<br />
or Drake&#8217;s brutal anomie) is part of its appeal.  Often (as in<br />
Heinlein&#8217;s <cite>Space Cadet</cite> or the early volumes in Lois<br />
Bujold&#8217;s superb Miles Vorkosigan novels) such stories include elements<br />
of <em>bildungsroman</em>.</p>
<p>The <cite>Sten</cite> sequence by Allan Cole and Chris Bunch was<br />
both a loving tribute to and (in the end) a brutal deconstruction of<br />
this kind of story.  It&#8217;s full of the building-character-at-boot-camp<br />
scenes that are a staple of the subgenre; Sten&#8217;s career is carefully<br />
designed to rationalize as many of these as possible. But the Eternal<br />
Emperor, originally a benevolent if quirky paternal figure who earns<br />
Sten&#8217;s loyalty, goes genocidally mad.  In the end, soldier Sten must<br />
rebel against the system that made him what he is.</p>
<p>Cole &amp; Bunch tip their hand in an afterword to the last book,<br />
not that any reader with more perception than a brick could have<br />
missed it.  They wrote <cite>Sten</cite> to show where fascism leads<br />
and as a protest against SF&#8217;s fascination with absolute power and the<br />
simplifications of military life.  Bujold winds up making the same<br />
point in a subtler way; the temptations of power and arrogance are a<br />
constant, soul-draining strain on Miles&#8217;s father Aral, and Miles<br />
eventually destroys his own career through one of those<br />
temptations</p>
<p>Heinlein, a U.S naval officer who loved the military and seems to<br />
have always remembered his time at Annapolis as the best years of his<br />
life, fully understood that the highest duty of a soldier may be not<br />
merely to give his life but to reject all the claims of military<br />
culture and loyalty.  His elegiac <cite>The Long Watch</cite> makes<br />
this point very clear.  You&#8217;ll seek an equivalent in vain anywhere in<br />
Pournelle or Drake or their many imitators &mdash; but consider<br />
Bujold&#8217;s <cite>The Vor Game</cite>, in which Miles&#8217;s resistance to<br />
General Metzov&#8217;s orders for a massacre is the pivotal moment at which<br />
he becomes a man.</p>
<p>Bujold&#8217;s point is stronger because, unlike Ezra Dahlquist in<br />
<cite>The Long Watch</cite> or the citizen-soldiers in <cite>Starship<br />
Troopers</cite>, Miles is not a civilian serving a hitch. He is the<br />
Emperor&#8217;s cousin, a member of a military caste; his place in<br />
Barrayaran society is <em>defined</em> by the expectations of military<br />
service.  What gives his moment of decision its power is that in refusing<br />
to commit an atrocity, he is not merely risking his life but giving up<br />
his dreams.</p>
<p>Falkenberg and Admiral Lermontov have a dream, too.  The difference<br />
is that where Ezra Dahlquist and Miles Vorkosigan sacrifice themselves<br />
for what they believe, Pournelle&#8217;s &#8220;heroes&#8221; sacrifice others.  Miles&#8217;s<br />
and Dahlquist&#8217;s futures are defined by refusal of an order to do evil,<br />
Falkenberg&#8217;s by the slaughter of <em>untermenschen</em>.</p>
<p>This is a difference that makes a difference.</p>
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