Tuesday September 26 2006
| Posted by Jonathan | 03:21:pm
Is it possible to write a science fiction story involving a young adult protagonist who has entered military service with the intention of serving in an extraterrestrial setting that reads like it was written after 1955?
September 26th, 2006 at 11:46 pm
Ender’s Game?
September 27th, 2006 at 5:41 am
Yes.
Will it be bought? Is another question entirely.
September 27th, 2006 at 5:55 am
Hmmm. Ender’s Game is a possible. Would it be bought? I think it would. The problem, it seems to me, is to find a way to make space travel look more than some piece of 1950s-wish fulfilment. Right now, it looks like a dream that died. How do you convincingly, in fictional terms, get us into space, and then move towards such a story, in a way that a reader born in 1990 or 1995 could find believable.
September 27th, 2006 at 7:20 am
I don’t think it would be any more difficult to write the kind of story you want than anything else, depending on the ‘hardness’ of the SF. But if you wanted hard near-future SF, then I can think of various possibilities.
Part of the whole ethos of SF, it seems to me, is being able to leapfrog current scientific/technical barriers with interesting, somewhat-plausible ideas and (hopefully) a great story.
September 27th, 2006 at 8:05 am
What motivated me to ask the question is that I have been reading a Mike Resnick anthology, Space Cadets. In many ways it’s a perfectly serviceable anthology, and even has a few good very good stories in it. Now, it may be that Resnick deliberately was seeking retro Heinlein juvenile-like stories, but every single story in the book struck me as being very old-fashioned, very 1950s. And hence the question: how would you write a plausible ’space cadet’ story. How would you put a young person in space in a military environment and (a) make it believable and (b) make it of interest to a young adult audience. I’d be interested to see the kind of story you’d come up with.
September 27th, 2006 at 8:25 am
I’d probably write a story about the military indoctrination of a bunch of 17 year-olds in the armed services being prepared for a really bad war, perhaps in the context of an alien beach-head on the moon and how the human forces would try to dislodge an enemy from this high ground. Maybe they’d be scramjet suicide pilots for near-earth defence or maybe part of some essentially non-surviveable last-ditch assault on the moon when all the unmanned stuff has failed.
So a few parts RAF in 1940, a dash of Hitler Youth in 1945, a bit of current ‘we must fight ultimate evil’, a few parts desperate cobbling together of current space capabilities from all nations, etc.
Would such a story work? Dunno. But I reckon it could.
Or there might be something else, to do with video games and teleoperated space combat, with the operators in an ISS equivalent and the fighting in a more distant orbit . . .
Or something else again . . .
September 27th, 2006 at 8:38 am
I love the sound of it. Alien beach-head on the moon, huh? The defence would have to be *quick*, or it’d be over fairly quickly. But, it could be done, I guess. Hmm. Interesting.
September 27th, 2006 at 9:14 am
Of course that previous idea might not be extra-terrestial enough for you. But I think there would also be room to move in something like a re-imagining of the basic idea used by Andre Norton in STAR GUARD (also published as STAR SOLDIER) and by others since, of Earth as a source of mercenaries for galactic conflicts.
Then there’s things like STARGATE, where you could use the current military and a macguffin to get them extraterrestial. Like a bunch of young Marines in Iraq who find a buried, ancient starship and accidentally head off . . .
Lots of possibilities.
September 27th, 2006 at 9:20 am
Hmm. There are. When I read Space Cadets I couldn’t imagine why you’d do it that way - be deliberately anachronistic. It’s unlikely to appeal to new readers. But this kind of thing could really work…
September 27th, 2006 at 11:27 am
Aside from the technology, I’m not sure that the idea of military service is present in the lives or imagination of young people today. In a recent writing workshop I was struck by the fact that the younger writers had absolutely no idea how armies or navies functioned. When Heinlein wrote his juveniles and Tom Corbet Space Cadet was on TV most young males in the U.S. faced the strong possibility of having to serve. Many had older relatives in the services. One of the functions of those stories and scripts was to make the idea of the military more exciting and more familiar.
September 27th, 2006 at 11:36 am
Hey Rick - That actually touches on another notion that I’ve been wondering about. How the military, in fact how military conflict, functions in the world we now live in. How meaningful is the notion of armed conflict between states? It seems an increasingly outdated notion.
In terms of the idea of military service: I’m not an American, don’t live there and have only a sketchy notion of the things, but it seems to me that the idea of military service might be increasingly common, the further down the economic spectrum you move. I have the impression that the people who serve, or expect to serve, in the army or navy now come from poorer, more economically disadvantaged parts of the commmunity. I doubt that the notion that serving in the military would be an honorable/desirable thing has been undermined over the past thirty years or so.
September 27th, 2006 at 12:08 pm
I guess since the US and Australia haven’t had the draft for more than 25 years, military experience is less universal among young men than it was. But I think there is still great interest in things military, and there are plenty of authors without any military experience at all themselves who’ve still managed a good job writing in the milieu (provided they know they need to find out stuff), in the same way a good author can write about all kinds of stuff outside their actual experience.
Jonathan: As for armed conflict between states, I think sadly there will still be plenty more of that come, along with the counter-insurgency and anti-terrorist stuff. Also, I don’t think it makes much difference what ‘level’ of war you are fighting to the grunts on the ground. Some things remain universal, no matter how much technology in other areas has changed.
On that note, check out SOMME MUD by E.P.F Lynch, edited by Will Davies (Random House Australia) a WW1 diary published for the first time this year.
September 27th, 2006 at 12:27 pm
Jonathan: In modern Western history, except for brief periods of popular enthusiasm (the French Armies of the Revolution in the early 1790’s, the European nations in the first year or so of World War One)only a draft would produce armed forces that included all the social classes. The ranks in non-draft armies were usually the lower orders of their societies, led normally by members of an officer class. In the U.S. at this point the young people I’ve known who have enlisted have been attracted by the scholarship help available after discharge and the couple of West Point cadets I’ve met went to the Academy for the free education. I don’t know how representative these kids are but glory and adventure did not seem to loom large in their plans.
September 27th, 2006 at 12:52 pm
Come to think of it, there’s plot hook in that.
September 27th, 2006 at 1:12 pm
Garth: I will check out the book. And I’m sure you’re right about armed conflict between states. It just seems that the whole spectrum of terrorist activity and counter-insurgency has become so ubiquitous that it is dominating the image of what conflict will become.
September 27th, 2006 at 1:13 pm
Rick: That seems pretty consistent with my impression of it. There’s actually a lot of story in and around this, I think.
September 28th, 2006 at 12:27 am
An interesting thread. Might I ask what sparked your initial question?
September 28th, 2006 at 8:45 am
I’ve been reading for The Best New Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year over the past few weeks. The latest anthology to get to the top of my reading pile was a collection of space cadet stories, one or two of which were good, the rest of which were mediocre. All of them, though, were Heinleinesque cadet stories of the ’50s. It seemed to me ridiculous that someone couldn’t come up with an intelligent, up to date, credible science fiction story that would cover that theme.
After this discussion, and some further thought, I’m now putting a proposal together for an anthology covering just this very subject. Sometimes coming across something you don’t thin is quite right, is just the motivation to try to do it right yourself. Don’t know if it’ll come off, but we’ll see.
September 28th, 2006 at 9:33 am
The fantasy quest novel is now the place where the “idealistic adolescent setting off on adventure” trope is to be found.