The Year's Best Science Fiction 11

Wars, and rumors of wars . . .

Not since the 1948-1950 period of intense activity by the World Federalists and the Association of Atomic Scientists has there been so much concentration on war themes in speculative writing. But there is a difference.

The pre-Korean stories were, by and large, prophetic warnings: end-of-the-world, or atomic-mutation, or back-to-barbarism themes. There are still elements of this, but the emphasis has shifted in a way both hopeful and dismaying.

Dismaying, because the crusaders are no longer with us: None of these writers seems to be working out of any belief that the war-situation (“dirty little wars” and “police actions”; perpetual disarmament conferences; missile-gap measurements; hot-lines and panic-buttons; coalitions and realignments; threats and retaliations) will get better before it gets worse.

Hopeful, because (with the loss of the bright-lining thought that the too terrible weapon had actually been discovered) the approach is now more analytical than agit-prop, more sociological than polemic; concerned with the motives and mores of war, and with the psychological and cultural causes and effects. Why do we do this thing? And what does it do to us?

Gordon Dickson initiated an extensive exploration of the military culture and the psychology of the fighting man with his explosive novel Dorsail in 1959. Since then, he and others have worked the same basic material in a number of interesting ways—but none, to my taste, so effectively or excitingly as the Dorsai series. (A new novel. Soldier, Ask Not, will be published shortly by Delacorte.)

Within the field, the only notable attempts at examination of war-directed forces at work in our own culture have been those of Mack Reynolds and John Brunner. But from points all around the perimeter recently, there has come a steady peppering of fantasy, parable, and allegory, turning an analytic (and usually sardonic) eye on the behavior of nations—especially our own—and the wondrous workings of what we still oddly call “diplomacy.” (Tom Lehrer’s “Send the Marines”: . . . For might makes right./Until they’ve seen the light,/They’ve got to be protected,/All their rights respected,/Till someone we like is elected . . . And then there was Dean Acheson’s parable “The Fairy Princess” in the Reporter. And of course Abram Tertz’s The Makepeace Experiment from Pantheon.)