Author Announcement: Linda Nagata

We are very pleased to announce that author Linda Nagata has joined up with the War Stories Table of Contents with her story Light and Shadow.

Linda is the recipient of the Locus Award for Best First Novel for The Bohr Makerin 1996, and the Nebula Award for Best Novella for Goddesses in 2000, the first digitally published book to recieve the award. Her short fiction has appeared in Analog Science Fiction & Fact, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Lightspeed Magazine, and Asimovs, and has released the following novels: The Bohr Maker (1995), Deception Well (1997), 3 Vast (1998), 4 Tech-Heaven (1995)Limit of Vision (2001), Memory (2003), The Dread Hammer (2012), Hepen the Watcher (2012) and The Red: First Light (2013).

Author Announcement: Yoon Ha Lee

We are very pleased to announce that author Yoon Ha Lee has been drafted into the War Stories Table of Contents with her story Warhosts.

Yoon’s first story was published in 1999 in the Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, and since then, has appeared in Clarkesworld, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Electric Velocipede, Lightspeed Magazine, Tor.com and others. Her first collection, Conservation of Shadows, was published earlier this year.

Open Channel: What does Military SF mean to you?

Military Science Fiction is an interesting genre, and there’s a distinction between MSF as a discrete subgenre, and any science fiction story that relates to warfare. 

Warfare has appeared in science fiction since the early days: Jules Verne and H.G. Wells certainly made good use of warfare in their stories. It’s really not until you have the release of Robert Heinlein’s Starship Troopers in which you see things branch off into their own universe. 

Where science fiction has often had a close relationship with the present, Military SF seems to have drawn a lot of strength from US Foreign Policy throughout the middle of the 20th century. It’s no surprise: the United States was waging a technological war against a largely non-technological local force. The genre seems to be politically as such, which comes as little surprise, when you see notable authors like Jerry Pournelle describing himself as being ‘to the right of Genghis Khan’.

Still, this doesn’t really mesh with my interests in Military SF. I don’t care much for the jingoism and over-the-top patriotism that has always struck me as overcompensating. What’s interested me far more is the experience of an individual soldier placed in situations where they have to make some really hard choices, because the situation is really life or death in the narrative.

This has evolved over the years. I graduated with a degree in Military History, and write within the field or present at conferences from time to time, and often, what grabs me is the focus on the individual. My wife, Megan, wrote on the shared experiences of soldiers between WWII and Vietnam, and I’ve been fascinated by the way individuals impact the overall organization to figure out and determine the most pressing problems facing them, and how they ultimately deal with that experience after the fact. Military SF, in this way, is an excellent means in which one can examine not only how people operate under extreme pressure, but how their decisions make an impact on the larger picture, whether it’s the outcome of a campaign or a larger geopolitical trend such as nationalistic imperialism.

So, what does Military SF mean to you, and what do you seek to get out of it?

Titanfall

Here’s a new game that’s caught our eyes: Titanfall, the debut title coming from Respawn Entertainment sometime next year. It’s exploded onto the internet recently, probably due to it’s insane looking trailer and the even more insane mech that they put together for GamesCom the other day.

Here’s the gameplay trailer for the game:

I can’t wait to play this when it hits the market.

US Military Power Armor?

NPR has an interesting article on the current developments into powered armor being developed for US Special Forces:

In the Iron Man movie series, Robert Downey Jr. plays a billionaire working with his trusty robot to build a protective suit that will help him battle evil.

Now, the U.S. Special Operations Command is teaming up with industry, universities and laboratories to see if such a suit can be created for the real world of combat.

Adm. Bill McRaven, who unveiled the idea at a conference in May, says it was inspired by the death of one of his troops in Afghanistan.

“One of our folks going through the door was killed by the Taliban on the other side in an attempt to rescue a hostage,” McRaven, the command’s top officer, says.

So McRaven challenged those at the conference to come up with better body armor. And he posed this question: “Why haven’t we put effort into ensuring particularly that guy going through the door … is protected to the maximum capability that we can provide him, as a nation?”

That effort is now underway. The Special Operations Command held something of a science fair last month in Tampa, says Jim Geurts, who buys high-tech equipment for the command. At the conference, dozens of technologies were shown off, he says, including “advanced body armor, advance power supply, practical exoskeletons … [and] different display technologies.”

It’s all just a concept now, Geurts says. But it’s a concept with a name: TALOS, short for tactical assault light operator suit. It will take a year to even select which technologies to use.

 

This is pretty interesting – the US Military has worked on these sorts of things before: the Future Force Warrior program never quite went anywhere, but after a decade in the Middle East, it’s likely that we’ve found new uses and requirements.

Ender’s Game Trailer #2

 

Wow. That’s all that I can say after watching this. The film adaptation of Ender’s Game is looking very, very impressive, and after so many years of development hell, it’s nice to see this coming to life.

My feelings about the film are complicated. I don’t fall into the film boycott camp, simply because it’s a book that I’ve read and loved for years. Yet, at the same time, I can’t stand Orson Scott Card’s views. I don’t think that enjoying the book and supporting his views equate to one another. He’s already earned a boatload of money off of the book and presumably years and years of the book’s rights being snapped up by Hollywood. At this point, he’s made his views known, and I suspect that if he goes louder, he’s reached the point of diminishing returns – the backlash against the film already is indicative of this.

So, I’ll go out and enjoy it, purely as what might be the best adaptation of a military SF novel. It’s looking like they’re hitting all of the key points and visually, it looks very, very slick. I’ll be there to watch in theaters.