Blackfive TV: Military Sci-Fi Author Interview Series

Laughing Wolf of Blackfive announced a series of taped and written interviews with noted military sci-fi authors on 8 September.

According to the post, the list of authors includes: Tom Kratman, Michael Z. Williamson, David Drake, Mark Van Name, David Weber, and Travis S. Taylor in the first series, and Jerry Pournelle, Larry Niven, Dean Ing, John Ringo, and -- they hope -- Tim Zahn.

All this MOGS can say is "awesome."

I've pretty much read all of the above at one point or another, some I follow pretty closely still. Yes, the stable is pretty heavy on Baen but I see that as a plus personally! :)

Anywho, here's some gouge on the first writer up on the blocks, Tom Kratman.

And here's links to Pts I and II of their interview.

The videos are also on Blackfive's YouTube channel, for those of you playing along there.

As Mark Steyn learned not too long ago in reviewing a novel called Caliphate (BTW, thanks Carly for the hardcover!), and as both Antitool and I learned, Kratman can be pretty damn scary at times, and compelling. Agree or not, like it or not, you just...can't...turn...away.

Here's what I find to be most compelling about military sci-fi, whether you go all the way back to Joe Haldeman and The Forever War, or Drake's Hammer's Slammers, or Ringo's Posleen War series or David Weber and Honor Harrington, or Heinlein's Starship Troopers or Card's Ender's Game, or Stirling's Draka: they all make you think, and the best of them, think real hard, good, and long, regardless of whether the author intended you to muse on Clausewitz and Jomini or just have a good ol' time killin' some bugs...

Reading bits and pieces of Clausewitz for school now and procrastinating by listening to the Kratman interview, I saw a bit of interplay between one of Clausewitz's key themes, and the role of military sci-fi in general. Clausewitz wrote of the difference between the theoretical "ideal" (idealized might be the better word) or "pure" war, one which eventually reaches a scale of unmatched brutality and violence with no restraints between two belligerent nations which ends in total destruction of one by the other. This contrasted with "real world" war, the extension of politics etc etc and there you go.

There is some criticism out there and some belief that mil sci-fi is nothing but macho wish fulfillment and geeking out on hardware. Well, it is to an extent, and sometimes gleefully so, and trust me, if you don't think we actually NEED a little of that just to keep things sane, then I would recommend a nice tall glass of lighten up. Mil sci-fi serves the purpose I think of getting one to think in terms of Clausewitz's dialectic arguments without trying to finish Clausewitz's unfinished V am Krieg. Mil sci-fi (and Pidge is getting me to read some mil fantasy finally too) opens up that discussion - "suppose," "what-if," "hey, what about," somewhat but not fatally detached from realities of culture, politics, nationalism, technology, all the things that interact in the conduct of war.

It's not just thinking about the subject or theorizing, like one would see in conventional settings for military thought (i.e. - Parameters, Military Review, or Air and Space Power Journal among others), it's about having a little more freedom to do some things you really can't (nor perhaps, should) get away with in that setting:

It's the freedom to be an utter and complete bastard.

In MOGSY's tiny pea-sized brain, the military profession almost DEMANDS of its practitioners the intellectual and moral freedom of action (hold on now before you go ape) to be a complete and total bastard, at least in thought. Given a demandingly nasty situation - whether we're talking the idealized theoretical "total war," planning the destruction of an armored division or an enemy air defense, or an ugly bit of counter-insurgency, one must conceive of the worst things imaginable, or the entire spectrum of good, bad, and worse - and here's why, not so that you can do them yourself, though you might need to do some rather awful things sometimes, but more importantly, since you (those of us adhering to the Western or American Way of War if you're a Victor Davis Hanson fan especially) so you can anticipate the enemy doing them, and be enough of a bastard yourself to know how to turn it back on him.

Being a bastard is not the same thing as being immoral, or evil. They're not interchangeable. Being a bastard is about being able to think upside down, inside out, left-to-right, you name it. There's more to it than creativity, there's a bit of instinct and a little bit of...something else, perhaps a little bit of meanness or "fight" that lets you have the mental freedom to "take care of business." Perhaps the ancients called it "cunning," I don't know. I do know that Greeks and the Romans had a certain level of fondness for trickery and, when they were at their best, knew the fine line to tread between "breaking too many skulls, and breaking too few." (Sorry Mr. Weber)

If you read some of the scenarios postulated by the best mil sci-fi writers and some of their greatest heroes and villains, bastardity (pay no attention to the neologism behind the curtain), of the magnificent and almost noble kind, is a consistent trait. At the very least, it's at least about engaging visceral and intellectual reactions in readers.

With that, I'd like to say that Antitool, I was dead wrong in our recent conversations in DC. :)