A Mecha Post

A month has flown by, and I'm genuinely bemused at my inability to have generated new posts, given how much painting I've been doing. But nothing has quite gelled into a finished model to show.

So here's a post with some book and manga suggestions for those readers who may be in need of some mecha reading.

Hardfought (1983) by Greg Bear
Cloned, energy-exosuited soldiers fight aliens, but human identity is the main casualty. On my to be read list.

Great Sky River (1987) by Gregory Benford
Post-apocalypse nomads in battlesuits fight to survive against alien robots. On my to be read list.
 
Rimrunners (1989) by C. J. Cherryh
After the Company War ends, a battlesuit trooper finds herself trapped, incognito, among civilians on the other side. One of my favourite books with power armour.

Warstrider Series (1994) by William H. Keith
Exotic aliens and “realistic” mecha that transform via nanotechnology. This is an early series from Keith after his BattleTech Gray Death series, which has a lot going on it that makes him one of my favourite authors.
 
The War for Eternity (1983) by Chris Rowley
Ursoid aliens and their human allies fight power-armored space marines. On my to be read list.

Legacy (1995) by Steve White
Human marines in well described powered armor fight to liberate an alien world. Recommended to me.
 
Appleseed  (Manga) by Masamune Shirow
Battlesuited cops, cyborgs and terrorists clash in a realistic cyberpunk future. I love my treasured old copy I have.

Metal Skin Panic Madox 01 (Animeigo)
An ordinaryJoe finds a secret battlesuit – now the military wants it back. This is worth watching for the power armour design. Recommended, though good luck finding a copy, but you can watch it here.

Guest on SciFi Shenanigans

  

This is late news because I became distracted by world events. I remembered to put it up on Facebook, but forgot to do so here. I can only blame myself for not posting this news here sooner. Doh!

I was recently invited to be a guest on the SciFi Shenanigans podcast.

So now you can hear me speak in Episode 155 – MilSciFi Panel 3 – British Edition, hosted by JR Handley with my fellow Mil-SF authors Tim C Taylor, and Ralph Kern.

In other news, after a long hiatus I've started writing, refreshed after a long, much needed break to sort out my shit.
  

Military SF Genre: Part 3

  

Here are the links to parts one and two.

To say that the discussions around military SF can become somewhat fraught as a result of the conflict generated amongst the readers is probably an understatement.

Hence this series of blog posts to raise these issues, and address them.  Especially the opinion that people who read military SF are in some way bad, and that those authors who write the stories have a conservative political agenda.

Taking the latter point first.

While some authors do write from a conservative perspective, not all writers do. Therefore to make such an argument is to fall into the trap that has a number of different logical fallacies.

As for readers of military SF being somehow bad, from a notion that they have been brainwashed by right wing propaganda, and will therefore end up as sociopaths, I can only sigh.

I repeat again that this argument is based on logical fallacies that do not stand up to scrutiny; the psychological research on the subject of the influence of media on the behaviours of people can at best show correlation, and correlation is not causation.

The difference between the two being that it's easy to correlate connections between events, but that doesn’t mean that one caused the other.

This is as a result of how we think by using heuristic analysis to come to conclusions.

The research into thinking processes has revealed that we have a large number of cognitive biases, and that the beliefs and opinions we hold are more likely to be wrong than right.

Let me repeat that.

Our beliefs and opinions that we hold are more likely to be wrong than right.

People tend to believe that they come to hold their opinions from looking at the evidence, but the research shows that people form opinions, and then look for evidence that supports their choice.

 Furthermore, people tend to discount evidence that challenges their beliefs. 

Summary 

So, if anything I've said has caused a strong emotional response, that's a clue that an underlying assumption has been triggered. The thing about emotions is that they should serve you, not you serve them.

War is the ultimate expression of conflict. And just because some authors write about conflict in ways trigger a strong negative response, doesn't mean that writing about war is wrong.

What the research into reading and playing games about warfare shows is that the assumptions being made about what that does to people is flawed.

Conflict is at the heart of the human condition and avoidance does not serve us well.

Military SF Genre: Part 2

Continuing on from Part 1, what if anything do stories about war tell us about what war is good for?

Probably not a lot in the bigger scheme of things, because telling people what war is good for is probably not the primary remit of story telling in Western culture.

However, wars are fought for a wide number of reasons.

When those reasons ally with the maintenance of one’s society in the face of others who want to force change where change is unwanted, and though war involves lots of bad things happening to good people, good things are created too. The argument of avoiding war is one that has to be tempered with the costs of avoiding war, because while wars are frightening things, they're an illustration that there are no simple answers to some problems in life.

If science fiction is a genre that speculates about the effects of technological progress on society, where technological changes are driven by the need for victory, then military SF stories must therefore be a valid topic.

However, as I have observed, war is more than individual fighting; war is an institution.

Therefore like all institutions the people who work within the confines of the military hierarchy have a set of beliefs and theories based on reasoning from years of tradition as supporting evidence. If military SF fails anywhere it is in focusing on tactics, and not giving the reader a strategic context, with the necessary understanding of the operational problems that the military has to face.

The old adage in the military is that amateurs talk tactics while professionals talk logistics underpins my observation.

I can see that this makes writing a military story that works at the level of the character motivation a bit of a challenge. Especially if one wants to keep the story interesting; as descriptions of sergeants reading off loading manifests is probably not going to make for the most exciting conflicts.

Though as I write this I know I have a scene about checking the manifests of containers about to be loaded on trucks for a mission. So it can be done.

Assuming that one agrees that stories are driven by conflicts arising between characters and events; otherwise known as the plot, then yes, one can argue about the merits of each individual story, and its value.

But here’s the thing; if you don’t like a story it doesn’t mean it shouldn’t have been written. Or that people should stop reading it, because that's an opinion.

Remembering that opinions may be driven by feelings, because opinions are things that we hold dear. As such emotions/feeling cannot be subject to rigorous testing to be used as proof of anything much. 

Addendum 

Another recommendation of a book, which I thought was well worth the time it took me to read it, Michael Z. Williamson's A Long Time Until Now.  A quick overview here.

More in part three, which will be out on Friday. 

Military SF Genre: Part 1

Military science fiction is a sub-set of the SF genre, and readers of mainstream SF novels can be quite divided in their opinions about the merits of such stories.

There have even been editorial opinion pieces in on-line media. The Guardian, for example, ran an article complaining that using imagery of future wars to entertain reveals deluded beliefs that writers hold about modern conflict. The writer then proceeded to use this assumption to divide the genre into good versus bad stories. Not on the merit of the story, but judging them through the lens of political beliefs, and starting their polemic by quoting from Edwin Starr’s song War with its chorus line response of, "absolutely nothing!"

Therefore to write a military SF story as one’s debut novel into the field can be seen as a message about the author’s political stance.

However, stories involve conflict, and stories about war are just about conflict writ large.

Over the years I have commented on military science fiction books that I love, and on reflection my feelings remain the same. Avoidance of, or failure to discuss the importance of conflict, and the cultures that arise from conflict is to put one's head in the sand.

If you've never read any military science fiction I recommend the following without equivocation. 

Starship Troopers by Robert A Heinlein, I discussed it more back here. A book that can easily be misunderstood and misconstrued. It's theme is service, and the responsibility citizens have to defend their polity, which I see as a discussion of Greek City States. In short, we can learn from history. 

The Forever War by Joe Haldeman, also discussed at the link above, is a book that talks about alienation from society, through the lens of time-dilation, which makes it SF. Far less controversial than Starship Troopers, because it's talking about the human condition, rather than politics. 

Orphanage by Robert Buettner, which I discussed here, also talks about alienation of soldiers from society. But in this case, the effects of training to become a soldier, which the title of the series alludes to. Unlike the first two standalone books this is a series of five novels. 

The Heritage Trilogy by Ian Douglas starts with Semper Mars. I discussed it here. It's a favourite of mine, but it also talks about culture. In this case, the culture of the Marines, which is a lot of fun. And it's a trilogy of trilogies.  

The Compleat Bolo by Keith Laumer. Again the first link will take you to where I discussed his work. This collection of stories about self-aware tanks are seminal to the concepts of artificial intelligence in the science fiction genre. I recently re-read my copy to reacquaint myself with the tales, which was a surprise, because my recall of them was different than the experience of the re-read.

It gave me lots of ideas for my The World of Drei homage to Laumer.

On that note, I will finish. More in part two.

Military SF Relationship to SF Wargames

   

I like playing games for many reasons, like they are fun.  Also, play is the foundation of learning.  There's lots of research supporting play as being one of the ways people learn new things.  It keeps your brain active to learn new things, which will help you live longer with all your senses remaining intact.  I'm going to be on a panel at the this years Worldcon, which is being held in London,  called LonCon3.  You can read about the panel on military SF I'm on here.

I thought it was as good as time as any to now talk about a few of the military SF books I've read over the years here.

The genesis of the military SF as a sub-genre of SF can arguably be traced back to G. T. Chesney’s seminal novella The Battle of Dorking, which was published 1871.  This tells the story of the successful German invasion of Britain from the deployment of a wonder weapon called the fatal engines; a plot McGuffin that once mentioned is then passed on by.  This novella is seen as a precursor story that influenced H. G. Wells’, in both his well known novel The War of the Worlds that appeared in 1897, and the his later short story The Land Ironclads of 1903.  The latter story has a description of a vehicle called a Land Ironclad, which the modern reader will recognise as a tank, which were invented, and first deployed during the First World War.  Of interest to me is the fact that Wells also went on to write what is arguably the first set of rules to play wargames with toy soldiers, called Little Wars, which I have the pleasure of owning a first edition copy of.  

I am not going to make the argument that SF is in anyway predictive of the future, only that writers were thinking about the future, and the possible changes that might come from the introduction of technology.  The truth is that writers mostly get this wrong, and when they do get it right they often fail to imagine what are called the second order effect of technology.

For example, Isaac Asimov, had one of his characters using a mobile phone in his robot detective stories.  There is a description where a character answers a call, only to reply that he can’t talk right now, because he will causing a disturbance in a public place (oh how we laugh).  While the social change that leads to that may yet arise, the complete lack of ring tones was another thing that was missed.  This isn’t to rain on Dr. Asimov’s abilities as a writer, but merely serve to illustrate that no matter how carefully one thinks things through, one is highly unlikely to get all the details right.  

When authors do predict the future, with what appears to be uncanny accuracy, it is probably a serendipitous outcome, arising from the synergy from the process of research and speculative writing (that's fancy speak for making a good guess).

Probably the most influential military SF novel written in the history of the genre to date is Robert A. Heinlein’s seminal 1959 novel Starship Troopers.  The novel discusses military service and citizenship.  Heinlein sets the story in a future where soldiers don power armour to defend the Earth, from alien bugs.  I believe the story is inspired by the history of the birth of democracy in Greek City states, which were protected by citizen soldiers called Hoplites, who went to war with their panoply forming up in phalanxes to fight; the Sixth Century BC  equivalent of power armour.  

Arguably the biggest influence for the ideas that Heinlein espouses, come from the works of Rudyard Kipling.  In Starship Troopers Heinlein uses his story to have his characters discuss the morals and philosophy of waging war, capital punishment, civic virtue and juvenile delinquency.  When described like that the book doesn’t sound like an exciting read, which only goes to show how good a story teller he was.  

The weaknesses of the story is that while Heinlein introduces power armour for his soldiers he doesn’t foresee the second order implications of the technology.  Therefore he fails to account for the lack of combined arms; in particular the use of close support orbital artillery fire, which would be a no-brainer in the setting.  He also ignores the wider context of waging war by focusing on tactics, and ignoring strategy and operations; this is very much the purview of the amateur military enthusiast.

Finally, while Heinlein may not have written a set of wargame rules, like Wells before him, his story has inspired a board game from Avalon Hill, a tabletop miniatures wargame from Mongoose Games, and a first person shooter to play on the computer.  Not to mention several live action movies, and several animated series too. 

At the same time as Starship Troopers came out, Gordon R. Dickson’s Dorsai! series was first serialised in Astounding Science Fiction magazine, which told the story of a genetic super soldier whose story is about what it takes to command troops in war.  The genetics under pinning the novel are simplistic, which is not Dickson’s fault, as our understanding of how genotypes are the expressed in a person’s phenotype is far greater now than it was then.  The only reason I mention Dickson’s novels is because they were eligible for the Hugo award for best novel in 1960, which was the year that Starship Troopers won it.

From a military perspective there are many things that Dickson omits that would be present in his future, and the genetic stuff is outdated, though at the time I imagine it was thought provoking.  This series had a role-playing game supplement in the Combat Command series of rulebooks.  However, it lacks power armour, or any other mecha; as the Japanese refer to machines like the ones that Gerry Anderson put in his TV shows.

Also, for some reason, Dickson has his troops wearing synthetic leather uniforms, in field grey.  I wonder where he got the colour from?  If you have ever done any physically grueling exercises you will appreciate how inappropriate leather would be for doing said activity.  Unless stinking all the time is good for morale (this is a real problem when wearing NBC uniforms called Noddy suits in the British Army).

Keith Laumer was also writing military SF, and showed that he was capable of extrapolating technology, with stories about cyber-tanks called Bolos.  These first appeared in the 1961 short story, originally titled Frozen Planet, but later changed to Courier.

Laumer’s stories centre on huge sentient tanks that are portrayed as valiant heroes who will sacrifice themselves to protect their creators.  My only comment here is that he didn’t write enough, as I would have like to have read more stories set in the Bolo universe.  The stories are what I would describe as deeply rooted in the high concept of artificial intelligent tanks, but Laumer doesn’t go beyond the basic idea and tell stories about how the institution of war were changed from the introduction of the Bolos.

These stories, along with Colin Kapp’s Gottlos short story, inspired a board game called Ogre and a sequel called GEV from Steve Jackson Games, which feature combat between conventional forces having to face giant cyber-tanks.

I will mention in passing Bill the Galactic Hero by Harry Harrison, published in 1965, because it was written as a direct response to Heinlein’s novel.  It is the antithesis of Heinlein’s work, as Harrison despised the ideal presented in Starship Troopers, and deliberately set out to write a satire of Heinlein’s novel.  Harrison wrote from an unapologetic anti-military perspective from his experience of military service that made him anti-violence and distrustful of authority.

It’s a funny book, and a good read, because Harrison shared with Heinlein the ability to tell stories, but it only exists to counter-point Heinlein.  It describes military life from Harrison’s own perspective of experience of being drafted.  However, the novel fails to address any real implications of the military technology portrayed.  This is to be expected given that it was a subversion of Heinlein’s discourse, rather than a military novel per se, which is probably a reason why it has no board game or tabletop wargame.

The first novel to directly challenge Starship Troopers dominance in the military SF genre is arguably Joe Haldeman’s 1974 The Forever War story, which has two thematic sequels.  The Forever War tells of a war between us and the alien others, using the author’s experience of the Vietnam War for its themes.  Some reviewers like to set this book up in opposition to Heinlein’s, but I think this is a false dichotomy for what can be better explained by the differences in social reactions to the respective wars that the novels draw upon.  

Heinlein is talking after the Second World War, where the struggle was seen as necessary, and broadly a right thing to do.  Whereas Haldeman is writing after Vietnam war, where the struggle was seen as not only unnecessary, but also as wrong.  The Vietnam War was also the first war in history to have real time news footage aired on television, which in and of itself has coloured the public’s perception of war, and resulted in the military’s response to manage information where public opinion can directly effect political opinion.  Something that neither Haldeman nor Heinlein foresaw.

The Forever War book has also inspired a board game.  Given the limitations Haldeman creates in his future setting, from a military perspective The Forever War is also notable as it does introduce the problems of logistics on waging an interstellar war.

Then in 1979 David Drake’s short story collection Hammer’s Slammers was published, which became the first book in a series of short story collections, novellas, and novels that share with Haldeman the post-Vietnam sensibilities of The Forever War.  Drake uses the Hammer’s Slammers series to tell stories showing the effects upon his characters, as they become tools of war.

While I don’t enjoy Drake’s stories as much as I do Haldeman’s and Heinlein’s, what I do think he does through his work is illustrates the effects that the institution of war has on people.  He also shows how technology changes how wars are fought; in this case the deployment of blowers, which are effectively flying tanks.

Besides that, there is a rather excellent tabletop miniatures wargame called The Crucible, written I will add by two friends of mine: John Lambswood and John Treadaway. 

I have a particular interest in what happens to people when one puts them into armour that enhances their abilities, so John Steakley’s 1984 novel Armor, is important to the military SF genre for its depiction of the psychological effects that comes from doing so.  The extrapolation of the technology takes second place to inner turmoil of the main character.  The latter half of the novel takes place after the war, which serves as background for the events that happen on another planet.  So, Armor, as a story doesn’t fully explore the implications on the way wars are fought, or their impact on society.  However, it still remains one of the seminal power armour stories in the genre.

Robert Buettner’s 2004 novel Orphanage was the start of what is now called the Jason Wander Series.  The books explore the war against the alien others, with troops encased in power armour in a setting that features space and brown water naval action.  The follow-on sequel series features tanks, so Buettner is trying to write stories that cover the whole spectrum of war, and reasons why wars are fought.  The logistics and operational aspects arising when one wants to compel an opponent to stop doing what you don’t want them do is very much at the heart of the Orphanage setting.  All it needs now is a games company to produce a game for people to play in the rather unique setting that Buettner has created.