108 lines
7.5 KiB
Plaintext
108 lines
7.5 KiB
Plaintext
The Charms and Terrors of Military SF
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<p>I took some heat recently for describing some of Jerry Pournelle’s<br />
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SF as “conservative/militarist power fantasies”. Pournelle uttered a<br />
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rather sniffy comment about this on his blog; the only substance I<br />
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could extract from it was that Pournelle thought his lifelong friend<br />
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Robert Heinlein was caught between a developing libertarian philosophy<br />
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and his patriotic instincts. I can hardly argue that point, since I<br />
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completely agree with it; that tension is a central issue in almost<br />
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eveything Heinlein ever wrote.</p>
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<p>The differences between Heinlein’s and Pournelle’s military SF are<br />
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not trivial — they are both esthetically and morally important.<br />
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More generally, the soldiers in military SF express a wide range<br />
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of different theories about the relationship between soldier,<br />
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society, and citizen. These theories reward some examination.</p>
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<p>First, let’s consider representative examples: Jerry Pournelle’s<br />
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novels of Falkenberg’s Legion, on the one hand, and Heinlein’s<br />
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<cite>Starship Troopers</cite> on the other.</p>
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<p>The difference between Heinlein and Pournelle starts with the fact<br />
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that Pournelle could write about a cold-blooded mass murder of human<br />
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beings by human beings, performed in the name of political order,<br />
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approvingly — and did.</p>
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<p>But the massacre was only possible because Falkenberg’s Legion and<br />
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Heinlein’s Mobile Infantry have very different relationships with the<br />
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society around them. Heinlein’s troops are integrated with the society<br />
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in which they live. They study history and moral philosophy; they are<br />
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citizen-soldiers. Johnnie Rico has doubts, hesitations, humanity.<br />
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One can’t imagine giving him orders to open fire on a stadium-full of<br />
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civilians as does Falkenberg.</p>
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<p>Pournelle’s soldiers, on the other hand, have no society but their<br />
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unit and no moral direction other than that of the men on horseback<br />
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who lead them. Falkenberg is a perfect embodiment of military<br />
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<em>Fuhrerprinzip</em>, remote even from his own men, a creepy and<br />
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opaque character who is not successfully humanized by an implausible<br />
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romance near the end of the sequence. The Falkenberg books end with<br />
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his men elevating an emperor, Prince Lysander who we are all supposed<br />
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to trust because he is such a beau ideal. Two thousand years of<br />
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hard-won lessons about the maintenance of liberty are thrown away<br />
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like so much trash.</p>
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<p>In fact, the underlying message here is pretty close to that of<br />
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classical fascism. It, too, responds to social decay with a cult of<br />
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the redeeming absolute leader. To be fair, the Falkenberg novels<br />
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probably do not depict Pournelle’s idea of an ideal society, but they<br />
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are hardly less damning if we consider them as a cautionary tale.<br />
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“Straighten up, kids, or the hero-soldiers in Nemourlon are going to<br />
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have to get medieval on your buttocks and install a Glorious Leader.”<br />
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Pournelle’s values are revealed by the way that he repeatedly posits<br />
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situations in which the truncheon of authority is the only solution.<br />
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All tyrants plead necessity.</p>
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<p>Even so, Falkenberg’s men are paragons compared to the soldiers in<br />
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David Drake’s military fiction. In the <cite>Hammer’s Slammers</cite><br />
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books and elsewhere we get violence with no politico-ethical nuances<br />
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attached to it all. “Carnography” is the word for this stuff,<br />
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pure-quill violence porn that goes straight for the thalamus. There’s<br />
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boatloads of it out there, too; the <em>Starfist</em> sequence by<br />
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Sherman and Cragg is a recent example. Jim Baen sells a lot of it<br />
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(and, thankfully, uses the profits to subsidize reprinting the Golden<br />
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Age midlist).</p>
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<p>The best-written military SF, on the other hand, tends to be more<br />
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like Heinlein’s — the fact that it addresses ethical questions<br />
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about organized violence (and tries to come up with answers one might<br />
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actually be more willing to live with than Pournelle’s quasi-fascism<br />
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or Drake’s brutal anomie) is part of its appeal. Often (as in<br />
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Heinlein’s <cite>Space Cadet</cite> or the early volumes in Lois<br />
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Bujold’s superb Miles Vorkosigan novels) such stories include elements<br />
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of <em>bildungsroman</em>.</p>
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<p>The <cite>Sten</cite> sequence by Allan Cole and Chris Bunch was<br />
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both a loving tribute to and (in the end) a brutal deconstruction of<br />
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this kind of story. It’s full of the building-character-at-boot-camp<br />
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scenes that are a staple of the subgenre; Sten’s career is carefully<br />
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designed to rationalize as many of these as possible. But the Eternal<br />
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Emperor, originally a benevolent if quirky paternal figure who earns<br />
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Sten’s loyalty, goes genocidally mad. In the end, soldier Sten must<br />
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rebel against the system that made him what he is.</p>
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<p>Cole & Bunch tip their hand in an afterword to the last book,<br />
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not that any reader with more perception than a brick could have<br />
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missed it. They wrote <cite>Sten</cite> to show where fascism leads<br />
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and as a protest against SF’s fascination with absolute power and the<br />
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simplifications of military life. Bujold winds up making the same<br />
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point in a subtler way; the temptations of power and arrogance are a<br />
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constant, soul-draining strain on Miles’s father Aral, and Miles<br />
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eventually destroys his own career through one of those<br />
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temptations</p>
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<p>Heinlein, a U.S naval officer who loved the military and seems to<br />
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have always remembered his time at Annapolis as the best years of his<br />
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life, fully understood that the highest duty of a soldier may be not<br />
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merely to give his life but to reject all the claims of military<br />
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culture and loyalty. His elegiac <cite>The Long Watch</cite> makes<br />
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this point very clear. You’ll seek an equivalent in vain anywhere in<br />
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Pournelle or Drake or their many imitators — but consider<br />
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Bujold’s <cite>The Vor Game</cite>, in which Miles’s resistance to<br />
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General Metzov’s orders for a massacre is the pivotal moment at which<br />
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he becomes a man.</p>
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<p>Bujold’s point is stronger because, unlike Ezra Dahlquist in<br />
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<cite>The Long Watch</cite> or the citizen-soldiers in <cite>Starship<br />
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Troopers</cite>, Miles is not a civilian serving a hitch. He is the<br />
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Emperor’s cousin, a member of a military caste; his place in<br />
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Barrayaran society is <em>defined</em> by the expectations of military<br />
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service. What gives his moment of decision its power is that in refusing<br />
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to commit an atrocity, he is not merely risking his life but giving up<br />
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his dreams.</p>
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<p>Falkenberg and Admiral Lermontov have a dream, too. The difference<br />
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is that where Ezra Dahlquist and Miles Vorkosigan sacrifice themselves<br />
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for what they believe, Pournelle’s “heroes” sacrifice others. Miles’s<br />
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and Dahlquist’s futures are defined by refusal of an order to do evil,<br />
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Falkenberg’s by the slaughter of <em>untermenschen</em>.</p>
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<p>This is a difference that makes a difference.</p>
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<p><a href="http://enetation.co.uk/comments.php?user=esr&commentid=84479572">Blogspot omments</a></p>
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