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]
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The earliest form of Space warfare in fiction manifests itself in literature.
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 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]
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 "Fighters from Mars", an un-authorized and heavily altered version of "The War of the Worlds" [5] 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 guns to send "coruscating" bolts of energy across space to shatter planets in a war between humans and alien species.[6][7]
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.)[7][8]
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.[9][10]
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.[11]
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".[10]
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.[10][12]
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.[10][13]
Early television shows, like Captain Video and His Video Rangers (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.[14]
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. By 1995, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine portrayed space battles using computer graphics developed in part by Industrial Light & Magic, showing numerous classes of ships engaging in combat using tactics developed by military strategists.
George Lucas' 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 create complex, long space action sequences. Modeled after World War II-era dogfighting from films like The Dam Busters, the battle sequences were a major milestone in fictional space combat.
Soon, a number of more ambitious films and television series appeared, including ABC's Battlestar Galactica (1978). Using expensive effects influenced by those of Lucas' 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.[15] The series primarily used energy weapons ("lasers") in defense and offence on battleships,[16] however analogies to ballistic weaponry are made in several episodes,[17] ground based or otherwise. In contrast, the 2003 "re-imagining" of Battlestar Galactica makes use of more conventional weaponry, such as guns and missiles which are mounted on the primary capital ships (Battlestars, Cylon Basestars) and starfighters, as well as having a more realistic depiction of warfare in space, accommodating the pure Newtonian physics encountered in such an environment.[18]
In 1986, James Cameron and Gale Anne Hurd created the sequel to the 1979 film Alien, and used Robert A. Heinlein's novel Starship Troopers as a basis for the futuristic military. The movie features a small rapid response unit of the United States Colonial Marine Corps in 2179 using the USASF USS SULACO to response to a downed colonial transmitter on LV-426, the Hadley's Hope colony. The film showed many modern military vehicles and gear with a future twist an dropship, APC, an automated armed FTL transport vessel, 10x25mm caseless "Pulse" M41A1 rifles, flamethrowers, and machine guns, along with realistic body armor and tactical equipment. In 1996, Aliens: Colonial Marines Technical Manual by Lee Brimmicombe-Wood was published by HarperPrism that give a deeper look into the USCM and that was coupled with real science.
Starting in 1993, the TV series Babylon 5 chronicled a turbulent time in galactic politics, involving several inter-species wars. Political and humanitarian aspects were explored, such as the atrocity of using mass drivers from orbit against a civilian population, and technologies such the use of telepathy as a weapon.
The American TV series Space: Above and Beyond aired between 1995 and 1996 on the FOX Network, running for 24 episodes. The show was created by Glen Morgan and James Wong. This was set in the years 2063–2064, and show was centered around the "Wildcards", a group of United States Marines, members of the United States Marine Corps Space Aviator Cavalry, 58th Squadron. They are based on the space carrier USS Saratoga, and act as infantry and pilots of SA-43 Endo/Exo-Atmospheric Attack Jet ("Hammerhead") He3 fueled fighters. Most of the action of the series was based on the USS Saratoga a John F. Kennedy Class space carrier and centered around the Chig War. The series had the 58th squadron in both ground and space operations, and attempted to show technology that was near-future, but based on research. The show attempted to show the alienation of deep space warfare, the horrors of loss and survival on the battefield, and fighting an enemy that they knew little about. Unlike many other military science fiction works, Space: Above and Beyond shows the soldiers using weapons that fire bullets, fighting in space suits in alien environments, and the bonds that form in combat. The show was ended on an open-ended note just as the Chig War seeming about to end.
Blackmore[12] 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".
Destruction of planets and stars is another aspect of interstellar warfare that has been explored exhaustively in fiction, from the Lensman series[19] 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 [20][21] 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[22] joules of energy, or on the order of millions of times more than necessary to permanently break the planet apart at a slower rate. This is the equivalent of a mass between 1.1 × 1018 to 1.3 × 1019 tonnes of resting matter converted directly into energy (by Albert Einstein's formula, E = mc²) with no losses. For reference, the mass of the moon is estimated to be 7.36 × 1022 kilograms (or roughly 7.36 × 1019 tonnes, only somewhat greater than the upper estimate of the mass needed to achieve the estimated energy).
Star Trek had several weapons capable of destroying planets, such as the Planet Killer[23], which fired a beam that ripped planets to shreds. The Planet Killer would then proceed to ingest the debris for fuel. Another could be the Romulan ship, Narada[24]. The Narada had the ability to drill into a planet, and drop a fictional substance called red matter into the core, which would then implode, and form a Black Hole, destroying the entire planet, and anything near enough to get caught in its gravitational well.
On the TV series Stargate SG-1 a star was completely destroyed by removing chunks of the mass of the star via a wormhole portal connected to a black hole, 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.[25] Stargate Atlantis featured the destruction of several planets: Doranda by a failed experiment at harnessing zero-point energy overloading and annihilating the entire solar system as well as Asuras by amassing large amounts of neutronium on the surface; the superdense material became so heavy that it sank into the planet's core and imploded due to the pressure.
In the Halo game series' universe, the antagonists known as the Covenant would orbitally bombard with plasma vitrifying a planet's surface - resulting in a layer of lechatelierite or silica glass, a process known in-universe as "glassing." This effectively cauterizes the surface of the planet without outrightly destroying it. This is believed to be done as a ritualistic cleansing tactical maneuver.
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.[26][27][28] The Federation Starfleet (Star Trek), Imperial Navy (Star Wars) and Earthforce ("Babylon 5") also use a naval-style rank structure and hierarchy; the former is based on the United States Navy and the Royal Navy.[29] The United Nations Space Command (Halo) fully retains all ranks of the United States armed forces, even the pay grade system. Many stories even use current naval ship classes (such as frigate or destroyer) as a marker to show how their craft are assembled and the purpose they are designed for. Some video games series also use similar fleets structures, as in Mass Effect, where the primary ships are frigates, but cruisers and dreadnoughts are also present. In Mass Effect, the player is put in charge of a frigate, the SSV Normandy. In some cases, spaceships in some fictions have their parallel role in naval warfare. For instance, most spaceships in Infinite Space are classified in different role, up to using prefix "DD", "CG", "CV" and "BB" (US Navy hull classification symbol for destroyer, cruiser, carrier and battleship respectively).
On the other hand, some fictional universes have different interpretations. The Colonial Fleet (Battlestar Galactica) uses a mixture of army and navy ranks, and the Stargate universe has military spacecraft under the control of modern air forces (particularly the United States Air Force) and hence air force ranks. In the Andromeda universe officers of Systems Commonwealth ships follow Navy ranking, but there are also soldiers analogous to Marines called Lancers who use Army ranks.