IGMS Issue 36 Read online

  For aliens, I think there are two general possibilities. One is that, like humans, something about survival of the species and the development of intelligence also hardwires in some form of organized aggression. It wouldn't necessarily be in the form that humans use. My alien race called the Kicks, for example, are herbivore herd animals who take the reasonable-to-them position that nothing must compete with the herd for resources, and any predator must be eliminated before it can kill and eat members of the herd. My enigma race is motivated by what seems to humans to be an irrational fear of anyone learning anything about them. The Dancers, on the other hand, don't appear to be aggressive but have developed some extremely nasty weapons to keep away species which are aggressive. That's the second possibility, that as long as some species are aggressive, other species must at least prepare to defend themselves. Even a pacifist wants to be able to lock their doors at night.

  SCHWEITZER: Of course space war changes a lot of the usual assumptions. How do you make the conflict plausible? If there is an infinity of planets, why fight over one? What resources could possibly be worth the effort of interstellar warfare, or interstellar pillaging?

  HEMRY: I think the plausibility of space war depends partly on the tech available, but only partly. The sad truth of humanity is that we bow to few barriers when it comes to waging war. World War I might be the best/worst example, a horrible conflict with millions dead which started for not much of any reason and kept going because neither side would quit. We don't need good reasons to fight, and as long as one side is determined to fight, the other side is stuck with fighting back. But there are also plausible reasons for war. One is simply real estate, the tendency to fight for territory even if it is not needed. But good real estate might be rare in space. An earth-type planet might be worth a great deal. Sure, you might be able to terraform another planet to earth-standards for the same amount of effort and cost you're putting into trying to conquer an earth-type planet, but since when has that logic stopped us? Even if there are plentiful habitable worlds and means of transportation that make them reachable, people are likely to fight over them in the same way that we fight over everything. It might be about resources, or politics, or religion, or "science" (since both the major threats of the 20th Century, the Nazis and the Communists, claimed to have systems operating purely on the basis of scientific principles). The questions will be what limits we place on ourselves in such fighting. Will we destroy planets in order to save them? Or will we refrain from orbital bombardments so as to keep the world intact while we try to wipe out our enemies upon it?

  Or, will someone write stories that make us think about whether we want to fight such battles? About what the consequences of such policies and such conflicts might be? And, if we're stuck in one, do we keep mindlessly plowing ahead with another Big Push, or do we consider alternatives?

  SCHWEITZER: As for Star Trek design, presumably the pylons are made of balonium or surrounded by a balonium field, which can stand the stresses. "Balonium" being defined as that substance or field effect which suspends the laws of nature as needed for the plot. Otherwise I think the idea is that if the engines blow, the saucer section of the Enterprise might survive. By Next Generation, we are shown that the saucer section can actually separate under some circumstances. Of course if the issue is radiation from the engines, one wonders about the health and reproductive prowess of the engineering crew. One might be better off as a red shirt!

  This does raise a serious question. Balonium. How do you write your way around things you know to be impossible?

  HEMRY: What's impossible? Seriously. I've had experts tell me that it was impossible to weld titanium. The experts forgot to tell the Russians, though, so the Russians went ahead and found out how to do it. I had a character say "everything is impossible if you don't do it right." Once you start digging into things, a lot of stuff declared to be impossible was never actually established as such, and many impossible things in the past are now standard practice. The impossible is even enshrined in current physics, as in tunneling and entanglement. Finding out how to do things once considered impossible is the trick.

  That said, I try to keep the impossible to a minimum. Both FTL systems used in the Lost Fleet books are consistent with current theory. Neither may actually work, but both could work based on current assumptions. (And since Einstein never actually said FTL was impossible, and one system is based on quantum entanglement which is inconsistent with Relativity anyway, there's nothing impossible here.) That gives me FTL capability, but because of the nature of the systems they only work between stars and isolate the ships from real space during the trip. Inside star systems, everybody is limited to light speed for communications and all of their sensors, and subject to escalating relativistic effects if they go up past a small fraction of light speed. All of that reality doesn't just provide "mere corroborative detail intended to give artistic verisimilitude to an otherwise bald and unconvincing narrative" by making the other stuff sound more plausible, it also makes me write better by preventing me from resorting to technical deus ex machina, and it brings home the vastness of space in ways that mere numbers of kilometers could not. I do assume some things to simplify the story. For example, artificial gravity on the ships. I wrote a series (the Sinclair/JAG in Space books) in which everyone was in freefall except when thrusters and drives fired, and it's a major pain in the neck. Having everyone in freefall requires a lot more writing just because no one simply walks or runs or stands there.

  SCHWEITZER: At the very least, interstellar war would require very cheap and plentiful interstellar travel, and almost infinite energy. Which brings us back to the question of what is worth fighting for. World War I may have been pointless, but at least the armies could walk or take the train a short distance to the front. It seems to me that a space war might be more like Fiji Islanders in outriggers declaring war on Eskimos in kayaks.

  HEMRY: Whenever anyone brings up the "how can that work?" question about interstellar trade or war, my answer is always "apples." If you went back a thousand years and told the most learned people in Europe that someday it would not only be possible to ship fresh apples and other fruit from Australia and New Zealand to North America, but it would also be profitable to do so, the first thing they would do is ask where all those places are. Once the geography was explained, they would laugh at you. Journeys of that distance across open water? The voyages would take years, they would require fleets of ships and thousands of sailors and soldiers, and the losses of men and materiel would be huge. A round trip would be simply impossible even if some ships survived the initial voyage. How could it be done at all? And apples? Can't they grow apples in North America? Then how could anyone possibly make money by bringing apples across such distances even if it were possible? And they would have been right in that assessment given the technology, knowledge, industrial base, population and other factors in existence a thousand years ago.

  But today it is so routine to have fresh fruit from those places for sale in North American supermarkets that it doesn't draw a second glance. And people do make money at it. No one thing, no one invention, made that possible. It was centuries of progress and growth, hundreds of different inventions and discoveries, the creation of markets and means that would have been literally inconceivable a thousand years ago. Discussing instantaneously sending a message and reply halfway around the world would have been consigned to fantasy and witchcraft.

  Who knows what future centuries will bring? It took a long time for the advancement of science, technology, nation-states, and so on to make open-ocean voyaging routine and fairly safe. For thousands of years before that, sailors stuck to the coastal waters. Right now, we're pretty much stuck in Near-Earth Orbit. Someday we'll have the means to go a lot farther, and come back, and not break the bank doing it. It might take a few centuries yet, but history tells us that scenario is plausible and maybe even probable.

  And if we can trade, we can fight. If we can trade, history tells
us we probably will fight.

  SCHWEITZER: Isn't there some element in such fiction that we really do it for the spectacle of planets blowing up and vast fleets of spaceships clashing - as in Doc Smith's day - and we come up with a rationale after the fact? That is to say that "military SF" is driven by genre concerns, not extrapolative ones?

  HEMRY: All of that said, yes, part of military SF's allure is things blowing up. But the bestseller lists are devoted to things blowing up. Criminal thrillers, near-future thrillers, paranormal thrillers, legal thrillers, zombie thrillers. All you need to add is romance.

  In truth, one of the main reasons I write military SF is because of those who serve and those who haven't. A smaller and smaller percentage of Americans and other Westerners have ever served. I don't want them getting their ideas of what the military is like from comics and cartoons. I want them to know, as best as I can show it, what the people are like and what the life is like and how it really is. I do that for those who serve as well, because from all I hear they appreciate it a lot when someone gets it right and tells others.

  Which is another one of those real things.

  SCHWEITZER: Well if you write to give people a better idea of what the military is like, wouldn't it be more effective to do it in fiction about the real, contemporary military? Why do it in science fiction?

  HEMRY: There are two basic reasons why I write it as SF. The first is that I believe there are certain attributes of the military (and humanity) that stay relatively constant. There's a tendency, more pronounced in recent decades, to declare the some new technology has "changed everything." The new tech may alter tactics or strategy, but it doesn't change the basics. Our soldiers in Afghanistan are doing tasks that would be familiar to members of the Roman legions - patrolling roads, garrisoning lonely outposts, watching for ambushes, spending long hours bored in between moments of terror, complaining about the food, etc. I've read a great many first-hand accounts from history, and it convinces me that for every difference there is a similarity. I want to explore how that works out in futuristic environments, showing how certain aspects of the military will probably remain the same. The second reason is the classic SF advantage, that it can address modern, contentious issues in a way that divorces them from new-jerk reactions to current events. Gene Roddenberry said that Star Trek could do stories about Vietnam at a time when no other program could, because the stories weren't set in Vietnam but on other planets. To use a mixed metaphor, if you do a story about Iraq right now, every potential reader automatically raises their shields based on their own experiences, perceptions, politics and so on. But if you explore some of the issues about Iraq set in a different place with different players, readers can approach it without those automatic reactions. I'm looking at current issues, but by setting them elsewhere and elsewhen I can hopefully give a fresh look at things readers may not have considered. I'm not interested in political polemics. I just want to look at the role of certain things I consider important, things like a real sense of honor (based not on how others treat you but on how you treat others) or how easy it is for a person or a society to lose their moral bearings in a war, and do it in a way that both entertains and maybe sometimes causes someone to think about things.

  SCHWEITZER: You can raise some of the issues about Iraq in a story set on another planet, but surely the most transient sort of SF story is the one which is really about the present only the Somalis or Afghans or Vietnamese or whatever are green and have tails. This strikes me as neither good political writing nor good science fiction. Would you agree or disagree?

  HEMRY: I agree with you. If all you do is change the names, but the situation is otherwise identical and easily recognized, then it is going to quickly be dated. (As in Clarke's 2010: Odyssey Two, written in the 1980s, which opens with the US and the Soviet Union having a confrontation over surrogates in Central America in 2010.) But that's true of any SF and any literature. It is often painfully easy to identify a book written in the 1970s. The themes and ways of writing are as dated as double-knit polyester leisure suits. Good writing addresses current (and enduring) themes in ways that aren't obvious, which allows them to remain relevant past the specific circumstances of the books' genesis. The Forever War is about Vietnam and the draft-era US Army, but it's not just about those things. Starship Troopers is Heinlein's Utopian vision of a society and a military that was written in reaction to social trends in the 60s and the draft-era US Army, but it is still read and debated, and arouses strong feelings today. (There are, come to think of it, an awful lot of books and stories written in negative reaction to the draft-era US Army. I wonder how many people will recognize that another half-century from now?)

  So, starting about eight years ago, I began a series about things like a war that has lasted decade after decade, and the corrosive effects that has had on the military and the society it serves. I discuss how over time previously unacceptable practices get adopted in the name of "winning" or "defense" even though those practices don't seem to produce victory or safety, and may undermine the very society they are supposedly defending. I write about good people who make bad decisions for what they think are good reasons, and bad people who don't care about the impact of their decisions on others. I write about leadership. It's about what has happened in the past, and about what's happening, and it's about what may happen.

  SCHWEITZER: So what happens if you want to write a book that is not about the military and war? Is "military SF" now a ghetto within SF? Would your publishers let you get away with, say futuristic domestic comedy? Or would you need yet another pseudonym?

  HEMRY: Military SF is something of a ghetto, and oddly one that is perceived to lean right even though military SF books span the political spectrum. I personally think it is an artificial category, part marketing and part ghettoizing. No one ever talks about "military Westerns" or "military fantasy" or "military romance" no matter how many battles are involved. Why is She Wore a Yellow Ribbon just a Western while The Forever War is military SF? But, like space opera but even more so, military SF is not considered quite respectable. I think that's ridiculous, because I believe space opera in all its forms has always been the bread and butter of SF. Literary SF may look down on it, but space opera sales are what subsidize the literary stuff.

  I do have a series I am trying to sell which is not military SF. I call it steampunk with dragons, which was a more revolutionary concept when I started trying to sell it than it now is. But, still, it's not military SF, and it has been hard to find a publisher for it even though Jack Campbell has been selling pretty well. I do think publishers (and readers) want to see their writers creating a consistent body of work, regardless of genre, and writers tend to favor certain styles and stories. No one would pick up a Dashiell Hammett book expecting a regency romance, and publishers would probably shy away from such a product. But it can be frustrating to be typecast as a writer, no matter the genre. But it's also a nice problem to have because it means you are recognizable as a certain writer instead of a "who's that?" writer. In my case, my writing style is consistent enough that I will try to stick to the recognizable name in any new work rather than adopting extra sub-genre specific pen-names. My short fiction has covered a wide variety of topics, including humor, fantasy and time travel.

  SCHWEITZER: Do you see actual generic conventions in military SF, i.e. things which seem to be in the books because readers expect them to be in that kind of book?

  HEMRY: Because military SF covers such a wide range of works, I'm not sure many generic conventions exist. There are plenty of stories with the officer who doesn't follow the rules but works for a by-the-book superior (same as in lots and lots of police and detective stories), and there are those in which the civilians are clueless and naive. After Vietnam, there were a lot of stories about how wonderfully professional and superior mercenaries were compared to regular military forces. The love affair with mercenaries was definitely a generic convention for a while, a backlash against the draft-era U
S Army. If anything, I've deliberately gone against that particular convention in my writing. One other convention that I think is fairly common is a distrust of authority in general and the government in particular. That seems kind of odd in a sub-genre dealing with militaries, but it is consistent with the usual American attitude toward authority and the government, and anyone who has served knows what amazing stupidity higher authority is capable of. I suppose another convention in military SF would be an individual struggling against the system, but that's actually a convention in SF as a whole.

  SCHWEITZER: On another subject, how did you suddenly turn into Jack Campbell?

  HEMRY: Jack Campbell was born of the mid-list death spiral with which all too many writers are familiar. My first series sold okay. My second series (the Sinclair/JAG in space books) was well received by those who read them, but too few people gave the first couple of books a try. By the time the last two came out the big chain bookstores were ordering practically no copies, and the books were doomed before release. Both my editor and my agent said I needed a new name to give my next series a chance. It worked. Dauntless sold alright, then better, and has kept growing, as have the rest of the books. Without the name change, I probably wouldn't have gotten published again.

  SCHWEITZER: As for the Barnes & Noble death-spiral, effectively you changed your byline to fool, not even a human buyer, but a computer. Suppose they'd just repackaged your books differently, but retained your byline and it had been gone through a system run by actual humans? If your books are not ordered, this is a self-fulfilling prophecy, is it not? Suppose Dauntless had been published under your real name, but an actual human being had been able to make a decision, "This looks different. It is packaged differently. It should do well. Let's order a lot of these and promote them."