Space warfare in fiction

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Space warfare in science fiction has served as a central theme within the genre, tracing its roots back to the "future war" novels of the 19th century. (Space warfare can be found in even older works of fiction. Lucian of Samosata's True History contains a space battle.[1]) An interplanetary, but more usually an interstellar or intergalactic war is one of the staple plot devices of a space opera. Despite its predominant role in science fiction writing, some conclude that the human race will never be involved in an actual interstellar war, because of the distances involved and logistical impracticalities.[2]

Contents

[edit] Literature

The earliest form of Space warfare in fiction manifests itself in literature.

[edit] Future war: the precursor to space warfare

The first "future war" story was "The Battle of Dorking", a story about a British defeat after a German invasion of Britain, by George T. Chesney published in 1871 in Blackwood's Magazine. Many such "future war" stories were written, prior to the outbreak of World War I, such as George Griffith's The Angel of the Revolution published in 1892 where "terrorists" were armed with at the time non-existent arms and armour, including airships, submarines, and high explosives. The inclusion of non-existent technology became a standard part of the "future war" genre. By the time of Griffith's last "future war" story, The Lord of Labour written in 1906 and published in 1911, such technology included disintegrator rays and nuclear missiles.[3]

H.G. Wells' story "The War of the Worlds" inspired many other writers to write stories of alien incursions and wars between Earth and other planets, encouraging the writers of "future war" fiction to employ wider settings than had theretofore been the case for "naturalistic" fiction. Wells wrote several other "future war" stories, such as an atomic war story "The World Set Free" in 1914,[3] and "The Land Ironclads", featuring an almost prophetic description of the tank, albeit of an unfeasibly large scale.[4]

[edit] Space opera

The Skylark of Space, Amazing Stories, August 1928
The Skylark of Space, Amazing Stories, August 1928

Space warfare in science fiction took its modern form, with mobile spaceships battling both planets and one another with destructive superweapons, with the advent of space opera. One story inspired by Wells was Garrett P. Serviss' 1898 newspaper serial "Edison's Conquest of Mars", intended to be a sequel to "The War of the Worlds", where the human race, under the leadership of Thomas Edison, takes the war between the Martians and humans back to Mars. Stories of this type, which glorify the careers of hero-inventors, are called "Edisonades". Pringle considers Serviss' story to be the very first space opera. However, the work that is most widely regarded as the first space opera is E. E. "Doc" Smith's "The Skylark of Space", an almost canonical "Edisonade" for half of the story. It, and its three successor novels, exemplify the still current form of space warfare in science fiction, with giant "mile long" spaceships employing great ray runs to send "coruscating" bolts of energy across space to shatter planets in a war between humans and alien species.[5][6]

Smith's Lensman series continued with similar depictions of space warfare. In Triplanetary (1934) the Triplanetary fleet engages the enemy with the Cone of Battle, for example. (For a list of many of the superweapons employed in the various space battles in the series, see Lensman's Weapons.)[6][7]

[edit] Late 20th century depictions

In the so-called "age of maturity" of science fiction, other depictions of space warfare arose, departing from the jingoism of the pulp science fiction of the 1930s and 1940s, such as Joe Haldeman's The Forever War (partly a response to, although not in everyone's view a rebuttal of, Robert A. Heinlein's Starship Troopers), wherein space warfare involved the effects of time dilation, resulting in the alienation of the protagonists from the human civilisation on whose behalf they were fighting.[8][9]

David Weber's Honorverse novels present a view of space warfare that simply transplants the naval warfare of Horatio Nelson (and of Horatio Hornblower) into space. The space navy battle tactics in the Honorverse are much like those of Nelson, with the simple addition of a third dimension.[10]

With the "age of maturity" came wider treatment in science fiction of the morality and consequences of space warfare. From the end of World War II onwards, science fiction writers have engaged in what amounts to a long-running dialogue on the subject of space warfare. With Heinlein's Starship Troopers are A. E. van Vogt's "War against the Rull" (1959) and Fredric Brown's "Arena" (1944). Opposing them are Murray Leinster's "First Contact" (1945), Barry Longyear's "Enemy Mine", Kim Stanley Robinson's "The Lucky Strike", Connie Willis' "Schwarzchild Radius", and John Kessel's "Invaders".[9]

Between Haldeman's and Heinlein's works (both of which in the past have been required reading at the United States Military Academy) comes Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game, wherein the protagonist wages war remotely, without even realizing that he is doing so. Jerry Pournelle "triumphantly" agrees (according to Landon) with Heinlein with his There Will Be War collection, also portraying an alien invasion of Earth in Footfall. Landon notes that Pournelle's There Will Be War spawned "a series of sequel collections, strongly reminiscent in tone and apparent propagandistic purpose of the 'future war' books". Opposed to Pournelle is Harry Harrison's and Bruce McAllister's There Won't Be War, Harrison having already satirized space warfare jingoism in his 1964 novel Bill, the Galactic Hero.[9][11]

Commentators and historians have accused several writers of, in the 1980s, writing science fiction about space warfare that was part of a propaganda campaign in favour of the Strategic Defense Initiative. Landon and Franklin accuse Jerry Pournelle, Ben Bova, and Robert A. Heinlein of "glorifying" the SDI with works such as Bova's 1985 novel Privateers.[9][12]

[edit] Television and movies

 This article or section needs sources or references that appear in reliable, third-party publications.
Primary sources and sources affiliated with the subject of the article are generally not sufficient for a Wikipedia article. Please include more appropriate citations from reliable sources, or discuss the issue on the talk page.
This article has been tagged since February 2007.

Early television shows, like Captain Video (1949), were severely constrained by the available special effects technology, with effect sequences typically difficult to set up. This, combined with the fact that these early shows were often live productions, meant that space action sequences were usually short and simple.[13]

Steady progress was made in production techniques throughout the 1950s and 1960s, and a change of the most common kind of programming to pre-recorded productions allowed more complex effects to be used, greatly increasing the ability of producers to show action sequences, including space warfare. The prime example of this period, perhaps, is Star Trek. While the future presented in the original Star Trek series was not one of open warfare, the machinery of war was ever present, and was used in many episodes. The show's principal weapon was the phaser, an energy-based weapon; the phaser was a flexible weapon, able to be used at a variety of energy levels including a less-lethal "stun" setting, and which could be set to fire in "wide beam" mode, to defeat multiple targets at once. Another weapon commonly seen was the photon torpedo, a missile weapon armed with an antimatter warhead. In the face of such powerful offensive weapons, defense was necessary, so spacecraft carried deflector shields to make survival possible. While battles were shown on screen, the expense and difficulty of advanced special effects still meant, however, that most battles were short and involved few craft. Although special effects cost dropped dramatically over the years, it remained expensive enough that larger battles involving many ships only showed relatively few of the ships firing and/or being hit[citation needed].

George Lucas's 1977 film Star Wars broke new ground in showing space warfare on the big screen. Advances in technology, combined with the film's comparatively high budget, allowed Lucas to bring engaging, long space action sequences to life. Modelled after World War II-era dogfighting from films like The Dam Busters, the battle sequences made up in excitement what they lacked in realism.

Following Star Wars' lead, a number of more ambitious films and television series appeared, including ABC's Battlestar Galactica (1978). Using expensive effects influenced by those of Lucas's film, and following his lead in concentrating on battles between starfighters, Battlestar Galactica (along with contemporary shows, like Buck Rogers in the 25th Century) set new standards in television space battles. It was perhaps the excitement of these scenes that drove their popularity.[14] The series primarily used energy weapons ("lasers") in defense and offence on battleships,[15] however analogies to ballistic weaponry are made in several episodes,[16] ground based or otherwise. In contrast, the 2003 "re-imagining" of Battlestar Galactica makes use of more conventional weaponry, for example guns and missiles which are mounted on the primary capital ships (Battlestars, Cylon Basestars) and starfighters.[17]


[edit] Technology

Blackmore[11] characterizes science fiction warfare as being a place "where all weapons work as promised in their promotional brochures", but points out that one thing that science fiction war romances have encouraged people to forget "in holding any piece of sufficiently advanced technology [...] is the apparently endless hose dragging behind it". In Blackmore's words, "[m]y [smart] gun is tied not only to an arms manufacturer and munitions supplier, to the Army supply and logistics apparatus that keeps it operating in case I drop it or it malfunctions, but also to people who make information systems, portable sighting devices, and infrared and thermal vision technology, to those who write software for the chips in the bullets and scopes, and to all the factories that produce those items".

[edit] Destruction of planets and stars

 This article or section needs sources or references that appear in reliable, third-party publications.
Primary sources and sources affiliated with the subject of the article are generally not sufficient for a Wikipedia article. Please include more appropriate citations from reliable sources, or discuss the issue on the talk page.
This article has been tagged since February 2007.
Main article: Planet killer

Destruction of planets and stars is another aspect of interstellar warfare that has been explored exhaustively in fiction, from the Lensman series[18] to the Death Star (from Star Wars). The energy required to destroy a planet or star is without a doubt well beyond our current scientific means; it has been calculated[19][20] that overcoming the gravity holding together an Earth-sized planet takes on the order of 1032 joules of energy, or roughly the total output of the sun in a week. More detailed estimates place the violent destruction of Alderaan (appearing in Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope) as requiring 1.0 × 1038[21] joules of energy, or on the order of millions of times more than necessary to permanently break the planet apart. This is the equivalent of from 1.1 × 1018 to 1.3 × 1019 tonnes of resting matter converted directly into energy (by Albert Einstein's formula, E = mc²).

On the TV show Stargate SG-1 a star was completely destroyed by removing chunks of the mass of the star via stargate, thus starting a supernova, as a means of destroying the opponent's fleet and preventing the resources of that solar system from falling into enemy hands.[22]

[edit] Naval influences

In general, fictional space warfare borrows a lot of elements from naval warfare, in addition to traditional dogfights. David Weber's Honorverse series of novels, in particular, portrays several "space navies" such as the Royal Manticoran Navy; these imitate many themes from Napoleonic-era naval warfare.[23][24][25] The Federation Starfleet (Star Trek) and Imperial Navy (Star Wars) also use a naval-style rank structure and hierarchy.[26]

[edit] References

  1. ^ Andrew M. Butler (2005). "Philip K. Dick. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?", in David Johnson: The Popular And The Canonical: Debating Twentieth-century Literature 1940–2000. Routledge (UK), 113. ISBN 0415351693. 
  2. ^ Eugene F. Mallove and Gregory L. Matloff (June 1989). The Starflight Handbook: A Pioneer's Guide to Interstellar Travel. Wiley, 20. ISBN 0471619124. 
  3. ^ a b Brian Stableford (2003-12-08). "Science fiction before the genre", in Edward James and Farah Mendlesohn: The Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction. Cambridge University Press, 20–21. ISBN 0521016576. 
  4. ^ Antulio J. Echevarria II. Challenging Transformation's Clichés. Strategic Studies Institute, U.S. Army War College. Retrieved on 2007-01-31.
  5. ^ David Pringle (2000-01-30). "What is this thing called space opera?", in Gary Westfahl: Space and Beyond: The Frontier Theme in Science Fiction. Greenwood Press, 40–41. ISBN 0313308462. 
  6. ^ a b Thomas D. Clareson (December 1992). Understanding Contemporary American Science Fiction: The Formative Period, (1926-1970). University of South Carolina Press, 17–18. ISBN 0872498700. 
  7. ^ John J. Pierce (1987). Great Themes of Science Fiction: A Study in Imagination and Evolution. Greenwood Press, 131. ISBN 0313254567. 
  8. ^ Darren Harris-Fain. "After the New Wave, 1970–1976", Understanding contemporary American science fiction: the age of maturity, 1970-2000. Univ of South Carolina Press, 55–57. ISBN 1570035857. 
  9. ^ a b c d Brooks Landon (2002). "From the Steam Man to the Stars", Science Fiction After 1900: From the Steam Man to the Stars. Routledge (UK), 70. ISBN 0415938880. 
  10. ^ Jaŝ Elsner, Joan-Pau Ribiés (1999). Voyages and Visions: Towards a Cultural History of Travel. Reaktion Books, 264. ISBN 1861890206. 
  11. ^ a b Tim Blackmore (2005). War X: Human Extensions in Battlespace. University of Toronto Press, 8–9. ISBN 0802087914. 
  12. ^ H. Bruce Franklin (1990). War Stars: The Superweapon and the American Imagination. Oxford University Press, 200. ISBN 0195066928. 
  13. ^ Captain Video and his Video Rangers. The Museum of Broadcast Communications. Retrieved on 2007-02-15.
  14. ^ Science Fiction Programs. The Museum of Broadcast Communications. Retrieved on 2007-03-07.
  15. ^ "The Living Legend, Part 2". Battlestar Galactica 1978.
  16. ^ "Experiment in Terra". Battlestar Galactica 1978.
  17. ^ "Miniseries". Battlestar Galactica: The miniseries.
  18. ^ See (e.g.) E. E. "Doc" Smith (1951), Grey Lensman, chapter 23
  19. ^ A page on "How to Destroy the Earth."
  20. ^ Estimate of Death Star yield on Stardestroyer.net.
  21. ^ Star Wars Technical Commentaries on the Death Stars
  22. ^ Exodus
  23. ^ On Basilisk Station (© 1993 Mass market paperback, © 1999 Hardcover)
  24. ^ The Honor of the Queen (ISBN 0-671-57864-2, Copyright © 1993 by David Weber, First hardcover printing, March ©2000)
  25. ^ The Short Victorious War (1994)
  26. ^ Okuda, Michael & Denise (1997). The Star Trek Encyclopedia. New York: Pocket Books. ISBN 0-671-35607-9. Images accessible at 2265-2370 Ranks. Spike's Star Trek Page Rank Chart.

[edit] Further reading

[edit] See also

[edit] Related concepts

[edit] Fiction