Reading science fiction like it matters since 1989.
1.
First the ground rules: it’s a lot of work to edit an anthology as I know from having edited many of them myself. It’s therefore important to me to say that I did not do the work on this one [The Year’s Best Military SF and Space Opera, Baen Books, June 2015]. David Afsharirad is the editor, and I believe his (our) publisher, Toni Weisskopf, was looking over his shoulder. My only involvement is to write this introduction and to read the stories as a fan.
I’m writing the introduction as a fan. I haven’t studied sf as an academic would: I’m simply an antiquarian who’s read quite a lot of science fiction over the years. This is an overview from an informed layman, and you may well decide that the layman’s viewpoint is very quirky.
The main point I’d like readers—you—to consider is this: military sf and space opera are often grouped together as they are here. Edges blur, and many writers work in both genres (I do, myself).
At core, however, the categories are quite different in tone, and they came from different directions. Icthyosaurs were not early porpoises.
Now, on to the work.
2.
Before the advent of dedicated sf magazines (the traditional date is April, 1926, the first issue of Amazing Stories) most sf stories were economic/political. (Please add “in the opinion of David Drake” to any similar statement hereafter.) There was little or no sf adventure except (sometimes) in the case of Lost World stories.
A typical sf story from Argosy in 1910, say, might involve someone discovering how to transmute lesser materials into gold and what that does to the world’s economic system. Another form of sf story (generally at book length) involved a traveler who found a Utopia and described how it differed from current political systems.
Stories of these sorts go back a very long time. We have Lucian of Samosata’s True History, describing among other things a voyage to the Moon, but people tend to forget that Lucian (in the second century ad) was satirizing earlier—and in some cases much earlier—travelers’ tales.
There was quite a lot of future war fiction also, but I would call most or all of it basically political fiction. The writers were trying to swing the public toward appreciation of a new weapon (the tank in Wells’s The Land Ironclads, the submarine in Doyle’s The Danger) or a revised military system (Chesney’s The Battle of Dorking or Kipling’s The Army of a Dream, one of the few stories of genuinely militaristic—not military—science fiction).
I’m tempted to make an exception for Griffith’s 1901 A Honeymoon in Space in which the British hero’s spaceship routs the armed forces of other planets with quickfirers and Maxim guns. He also swoops across the United States in aid of a contemporary political party, however, which appears to me to better display Griffith’s real interest.
3.
For me, space opera started with E.E. Smith’s The Skylark of Space, published in Amazing Stories in 1928 but written a good decade earlier. The heroes invent a spaceship and zoom about the galaxy, meeting and interacting with alien races. There are wars and battles, but the focus isn’t on what war does to individuals or society itself. (Except that if you’re fighting an alien race bent on genocide, it’s better to win. I don’t think Smith considered that a question for debate any more than I do.)
Further, the only economic point I remember involves the hero bringing back a platinum asteroid—to destroy the market for platinum jewelry. That will free scientists who need non-reactive crucibles from having to bid against wealthy women who want the metal for its scarcity value.
Smith focused on fun and adventure. He was extremely popular in his day, and he created the genre of space opera: adventure on far planets. When I was 13, I loved Skylark and Smith’s later space opera series. The line-by-line writing causes me problems when I reread the books as an adult, but they remain exciting fun.
4.
Early space opera tended to be multicultural and multi-racial. No, it wouldn’t be politically correct today (if only for gender portrayals), but it was written by people who were trying to say something positive about how intelligent people (from Earth, Mars, or wherever) ought to behave toward one another.
Real military sf (msf) appeared in the 1920s, also. Here the tone was often quite different—and quite unpleasant, even to a reader as non-PC as I am. One strand of msf grows from turn-of-the-century “Yellow Peril” novels; in these stories the Yellow Hordes now had airships, and they were frequently led by Bolshevik super-scientists.
At its best, this genre was racist and xenophobic. The stories in which the villains have enlisted Africans as cannon fodder are like nothing else I’ve seen, apart from some American Nazi publications which I filed when I was a book page at the University of Iowa Library in the 1960s.
5.
The 1940s brought military sf stories which focused on how battles were fought, what sort of men became soldiers (pretty universally men, I think), and how soldiers interacted with civilian society. These stories were about war and battle, not about race and ideology. Their appearance was presumably a result of World War II itself.
In part, this was because everybody had become interested in war: professional writers choose subjects that interest potential readers. Bluefish chase sardines, and porpoises chase bluefish. 1943’s Clash by Night (by the married couple Henry Kuttner and C.L. Moore) is such a story. Neither writer had any military experience then (Kuttner was later drafted), but they created a masterpiece of battle and warriors.
A few stories, though, came from the writers’ own experience. I strongly suspect that was the case in 1949 with “The Rocketeers Have Shaggy Ears” by Keith Bennett, though I never met him to ask. In form, “Rocketeers” is a standard pulp adventure (a band of soldiers fights its way through murderous jungle and hostile natives) but tiny details and the whole feel of the story convince me that Bennett had been an artilleryman on the jungle islands of the South Pacific. I can’t think of a story which better shows (not tells) the exhaustion of a long exposure at the sharp end. Notice how the soldiers start out talking about women but later talk about food. By the end they don’t talk about anything, just scan the terrain with tired eyes as they trudge forward, their guns ready.
“The Last Objective” by Paul Carter appeared in 1946, but Carter wrote the story while he was still in the Navy; his commanding officer had to approve it before it could be sent to Astounding. It’s just as good as “Rocketeers,” but it’s different in every other fashion.
Carter describes wholly militarized societies and a war which won’t end until every human being is dead. Rather than viewing this world clinically from the outside, Carter focuses on a single ship and the varied personalities who make up its crew. (The vessel is tunneling through the continental plate rather than floating on the sea, but in story terms that’s a distinction without a difference.)
Carter is pretty sure that his CO didn’t actually read the story before approving it. My experience with military officers leads me to believe that he’s right, though it’s also possible that his CO simply didn’t understand the story’s horrific implications.
6.
I look on the immediate post–World War II period as the Golden Age of space opera, but at least in part that may be because I cut my teeth on the sf appearing then. Poul Anderson started out writing “lead novels” for the pulps which were the right length to be reprinted as one half of an Ace Double book; he went on to write serials for the top digest magazines, which then came out as full-length books, sometimes in hardcover. Poul’s later work was more thoughtful and complex than his pulp adventure, but the earlier work was still fun.
Keith Laumer, Anderson’s younger contemporary, wrote a different kind of space opera: sometimes broadly humorous, often political (bureaucratic) satire—but occasionally giving the reader an unexpected emotional kick. Keith was less concerned with science and engineering than Poul, but he was more skilled (and enthusiastic) at writing action scenes.
A wide range of people wrote space opera in the ’50s and ’60s; Anderson and Laumer weren’t even the ends of the continuum. That said, between them they do illustrate how rich the space opera of the period was.
And to my taste, they were the best of a very good lot.
7.
A pair of excellent and very influential military sf novels came out within a few months of one another in 1959: Dorsai! by Gordon R. Dickson, and Starship Troopers by Robert A. Heinlein. Both men were skilled, successful writers. (Heinlein had helped editor John W. Campbell to create the Golden Age of sf.) In these novels, they were at the top of their game.
Dorsai! and Troopers defined the military sf field when they appeared, and they summed up the 30-odd years of msf development that had come before.
8.
The most important thing that’s happened to space opera in the ’70s and later is that nonprint media have overwhelmed the field. Even a writer as good and as successful as Dave Weber hasn’t had the impact that Star Wars did in 1977, and Star Trek tie-in novels began to glut the market for adventure sf. (Tie-ins to the Dungeons and Dragons game had a huge impact on adventure fantasy at the same time, but that’s outside my present scope.)
Star Wars and Star Trek were both classic space opera milieus. Jack Williamson or Edmond Hamilton could have written either series in the ’30s; Leigh Brackett, who wrote some of the best space opera of the ’40s and was married to Hamilton—scripted the first draft of The Empire Strikes Back. The plots weren’t new, but the format was.
9.
In the early ’70s, Joe Haldeman, Jerry Pournelle, and I began writing military sf. We weren’t better than Heinlein and Dickson, but we were combat veterans, something that had been very rare in msf until we appeared. (The only exception I can think of was Keith Bennett, and that’s my deduction from his story ... which constitutes circular reasoning.)
Note that there were many sf writers who were combat veterans—C.M. Kornbluth, one of the best sf writers ever, fought in the Battle of the Bulge—but they didn’t write military sf. Gordy spent his military service mowing lawns in California, and Heinlein’s brief service as a naval officer ended in 1930. (The Navy refused to grant him a security clearance when he wished to return at the beginning of World War II.)
The new thing which I think the three of us brought to military sf (I’m speaking from the inside now, and that’s harder than you might think) is a view of the pointless brutality of war. Nowadays, everybody knows that, but at the time Analog’s reviewer called me a pornographer of violence (to my face as well as in print), and I heard Jerry called worse things. I suspect the same happened to Joe when he was in the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, but I wasn’t there to hear it.
Joe, Jerry, and I changed the field so completely that most people today don’t realize there was a change. (When I took Introduction to Geology in 1966, continental drift was a hypothesis; a decade earlier it had been an absurd hypothesis invented by a meteorologist.) You don’t have to be a combat veteran to describe the pointless brutality of war, any more than you have to experience combat to describe its horror or to show cynical contempt for politicians and war aims.
It’s unusual for people who haven’t seen combat to appear to understand what that brutality does to the soldier, however. A few military sf writers did describe this in their fiction without having been there themselves. Paul Carter, whom I’ve mentioned above, was one. Two other exceptions are Richard C. Meredith and Barry Malzberg. Barry wrote the novella “Final War” and as editor bought Meredith’s We All Died at Breakaway Station. Though all three had seen military service, nobody had been shooting at them at the time.
10.
You don’t have to be a swashbuckling adventurer to write exciting space opera. You don’t need to be a combat veteran (or even a veteran) to write excellent military sf. (I haven’t written a better story than Clash by Night.)
As a reader, all you can demand of either genre is that it tell a good story, the same thing you would ask of any other type of fiction. Every once in a while, though, you may stumble over a real truth here, one that you wouldn’t have found in other genres.
I hope that you find that to be case in this anthology, and perhaps in some of the stories and authors I’ve mentioned above. 
Dave Drake lives outside Chapel Hill, North Carolina.
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