Earlier, while taking a look at SyFy Channel's first year in my July 20 posting on that matter, I said I'd get in my two cents on the admittedly off-topic subject of Mad Men.
I haven't actually seen all that much of the show (which at the time of this writing is settling into its fourth reason). In fact I made a point of ignoring it for quite a while.
I had my reasons.
Frankly, I was annoyed that AMC was adding yet another original program to its line-up. (What ever happened to the Classic Movies that were supposed to be running on American Classic Movies?)
I was annoyed by the idea of yet another TV show about an ad agency. Simply put, it seemed to me like just more of the media's solipsistic obsession with (or perhaps, utter ignorance of anything outside of) itself--most conspicuous in the abundance of TV shows and movies about people making TV shows and movies, for instance, but also extending to the abundance of TV shows and movies about people in the ad business. While I do not suggest that such works are inherently uninteresting, very few say anything worthwhile about a subject which is, if anything, overexposed, or use their premise as a starting point for an investigation of something more compelling.
I was annoyed by the near-unanimous critical praise, which always makes me skeptical, especially when it's being lavished on an original cable drama--as this has come to seem to me a good sign the thing being praised is wildly overrated. (That's certainly how I felt about The Sopranos, which the creator of Mad Men, Matthew Weiner, just happened to have worked on. The Saturday Night Live sketch which presented a commercial parodying the critics' breathless anticipation of the show's season two premiere was only too accurate in its take on the hype.)
I was especially annoyed that even as I kept hearing about it, it was hard to tell from the praise just what made it "the best show on television," or even just good watching (which is exactly the kind of thing that reinforces my skepticism). As far as I could tell, the characters smoked and drank in it. They engaged in sexual banter. They wore stylish retro clothes and sat in stylishly retro rooms, evocative of a time when hotel stays and airline flights seemed more glamorous.
Was that all, though? It didn't seem like much--and certainly, nothing we couldn't have got out of the old movies the channel was supposed to be running in the first place.
The pop cultural attention seemed all the more disproportionate given that not very many people were actually watching the show, so that any "impact" it had, regardless of quality, was presumably among the actual residents of TV land (other Hollywood people, critics and the like), rather than the broader viewing audience. Personally I've never regarded popularity as proof of quality, but that a show is actually seen seems a prerequisite to, for instance, Askmen.com declaring its protagonist (Don Draper) the most influential man in the world in 2009 (a declaration that instantly got a 700 comment-long thread going, one riddled with the words of the ridiculous, the disgusting, the just plain stupid and even the legally actionable).
Nonetheless, I eventually gave in and watched some of it. Most of the episodes I saw were from season two.
I saw that the show does indeed do a lot of the superficial stuff well. It is interesting to look at the period sans Technicolor and the old Production Code. But as for story, the show's focus in those season two episodes seemed to be on Don Draper's wife acting out in reaction to his philandering.
What's new here? I wondered. What's special? What merits all the gushing praise?
It all seemed familiar, run-of-the-mill stuff, and rather slow too. Not dull exactly--just slow. Contrary to what all the celebrants said, it didn't seem to be the "good" slow that sometimes (though not always) marks substantive storytelling--just the bad slow where everything's drawn out because NOTHING'S HAPPENING.
Yes, Draper's mysterious past means a bit of extra complexity. Of course, that could be the point--the dark things hidden under the glossy surface, the packaging of ourselves the way we package products to make ourselves acceptable to the world. (How many times an hour do career counselors tell those they advise to "sell themselves," apparently oblivious to the undertone of these words?) Still, I'm not sure the show geled for me as a treatment of this theme. At least where Draper's not actually being Draper is concerned, the story seems more like soap opera-style outlandishness than anything else, at odds with just about everything else in the drama--as if the writers themselves find their premise so limited that they have to go to extremes to find a compelling twist.
I caught some of season three as well, which seemed like more of the same. The episodes had a bit more zip, but they weren't much more substantial. The storyline about a British takeover of the firm in particular annoyed me with its anachronism (especially given the endless praise for the show's meticulous recreation of the past). The show is set in 1963 after all, and foreign direct investment in the U.S. was comparatively infinitesimal, that sort of multinational corporate activity virtually an American monopoly at the time. Additionally, FDI in the tertiary, service sector was a much smaller share of the whole back then than it is today. Indeed, assuming the Leo Burnett agency really is one of the show's inspirations, it's worth noting that the company didn't become a foreign property until the turn of the twenty-first century. So it really seems like a matter of reading today into the past, and no, I don't buy the New Historicist line that that's the only thing we ever do.
Again, it occurred to me that the writers were having trouble coming up with ideas.
Still, Mark Greif's take on the show in the London Review of Books has since struck me as more compelling, and certainly more substantive, than any of the others I've come across (though admittedly Amanda Marcotte's more favorable piece for The American Prospect contained some interesting ideas).
As Greif puts it, the show's all about "Now We Know Better," with a veneer of "Doesn’t That Look Good"--which is to say less-than-perfectly-honest self-congratulation about how much more enlightened, how much healthier and less bigoted we are now than fifty years ago, combined with a guilty pleasure in how much fun that yesteryear was for members of the more privileged groups. ("The drinking, the cigarettes, the opportunity to slap your children!" as Greif put it. Admittedly, they're good for a laugh every once in a while, like the roomful of smoking, coughing tobacco executives in the series premiere.)
Of course, this too is common enough stuff. Most history's self-congratulatory, after all; it's the more evenhanded stuff, the more critical stuff that's the exception. And this certainly carries over to historical fiction, which tends to rely on a touch of "Doesn't That Look Good" anyway, especially when examining past eras easily deplored for their mores--which I suppose is just about all of them. The particular appeal of Mad Men may be the degree to which it plays up that combo, and its setting them in a time and place much nearer to our own, much more familiar, and more directly relevant (it's the 1960s rather than the Regency era or ancient Rome, for instance, that living people still remember and which remain meaning-laden reference points in our culture wars) in a sleek package. This was then parlayed, through outstanding publicity, into a bandwagon feedback loop which has people saying this is the best show on TV because people are saying it's the best show on TV.
That sounds to me like exactly the kind of thing this advertising-themed show could explore, but like a good many other things, probably won't.
Friday, July 30, 2010
Tuesday, July 20, 2010
The Caryatids, by Bruce Sterling
New York: Del Rey Books, 2009, pp. 304.
"Caryatid" is a term from Greek architecture referring to supporting columns sculpted in the shape of women. Like those stone women, the principal characters of Sterling's novel are expected by Balkan war criminal and "mad scientist" Yelisaveta Mihajlovic--who has closed them from himself and raised them in a bunker on the Adriatic isle of Mljet--to bear up the weight of a world ridden with ecological crisis. There were seven sisters originally; four of these remain, namely Vera, Radmila, Sonja and Biserka.
The novel is structured around three roughly contemporaneous stories involving them, capped off by an epilogue, AND an afterword giving us still other views of them, all structured to give us strategic glimpses of key forces around the world in the 2060s. There is Vera among the Aquis, a sort of supersized, ultra-high tech ecological NGO (worldwide, but with its base in Europe), Radmila among the media-capitalists of the Dispensation (headquartered in Los Angeles), and Sonja on the fringes of the enduring nation-state of China, the last on Earth to really count for anything (and which has gone beyond totalitarian to "ubiquitous" in reasserting its power), while Biserka, a nihilistic terrorist, crops up here and there.
There isn't much in the way of plot. Of course, Sterling generally doesn't offer tightly plotted stories traveling along clear arcs. However, this time around the rather scattered storytelling results in a particular disjointedness that one of Sterling's characters actually comments on herself in the afterword. And at the end of it all, none of it seems to have mattered very much--less in the sense of the project that created the sisters being a failure (as it could only have been; how could the Caryatids have possibly done the job asked of them?) than in its becoming irrelevant as the world moves on. So there we are on page two hundred and ninety-five with a piece of future-oriented science fiction dismissing future-oriented science fiction except as a matter of "telling stories," in what can easily be taken for a cop-out at the end of the long, meandering journey--as well as a dismissal of the catastrophe he spent so much time describing since we just somehow got out of it.
Not that we haven't seen this before in Sterling's work. Like his short story "The Sword of Damocles" (perhaps the one I enjoyed least) The Caryatids plays the familiar po-mo game of telling a story by finding ever-more elaborate ways of telling us that it can't tell the story, not really. Admittedly this approach has its merits where the apocalyptic is concerned (as Kurt Vonnegut demonstrated in Slaughterhouse-Five over four decades ago). Nonetheless, po-mo is all too often a rationalization of evasion, and even an excuse for sloppiness, which we do see a surprising bit of here at the sentence-level. The stylistic excesses common to '80s cyberpunk--the sentences heavily freighted with flashy sciency-techie jargon and neologisms, the emphasis on description that is at once image-dense and oblique (which irritated me to no end when I first started reading it; early on I mentally compared it to reading Ezra Pound in neon lights)--can be exhilarating when done well. There are times when it works here, but the necessary editing has fallen short, a point particularly evident in the tendency to repeat a key detail within the space of a few pages.
As much of an issue as the manner of the telling are the intellectual tools that po-mo offers. Sterling has long drawn on a blend of two particular strains of postmodern thought--the corporate-globalizing, libertarian, "New Economy" outlook of Wired magazine and the Davos World Economic Forum, and the "linguistic turn"-shaped approach to cultural studies fashionable on university campuses in recent decades. It's a rare combination, but a natural one, given the underappreciated commonalities between them. Alas, neither has much to offer that's of real use in dealing with the book's central problem, with the result that there is more dancing around and dismissal of the problem of climate change than genuine grappling with it. Some interesting ideas do crop up here and there along the way, and the book is never dull, but as a statement "of faith in the power of human intellect, creativity and spirit to overcome any obstacle" promised in the blurb on the jacket, let alone a treatment of this particular subject, The Caryatids is underwhelming.
"Caryatid" is a term from Greek architecture referring to supporting columns sculpted in the shape of women. Like those stone women, the principal characters of Sterling's novel are expected by Balkan war criminal and "mad scientist" Yelisaveta Mihajlovic--who has closed them from himself and raised them in a bunker on the Adriatic isle of Mljet--to bear up the weight of a world ridden with ecological crisis. There were seven sisters originally; four of these remain, namely Vera, Radmila, Sonja and Biserka.
The novel is structured around three roughly contemporaneous stories involving them, capped off by an epilogue, AND an afterword giving us still other views of them, all structured to give us strategic glimpses of key forces around the world in the 2060s. There is Vera among the Aquis, a sort of supersized, ultra-high tech ecological NGO (worldwide, but with its base in Europe), Radmila among the media-capitalists of the Dispensation (headquartered in Los Angeles), and Sonja on the fringes of the enduring nation-state of China, the last on Earth to really count for anything (and which has gone beyond totalitarian to "ubiquitous" in reasserting its power), while Biserka, a nihilistic terrorist, crops up here and there.
There isn't much in the way of plot. Of course, Sterling generally doesn't offer tightly plotted stories traveling along clear arcs. However, this time around the rather scattered storytelling results in a particular disjointedness that one of Sterling's characters actually comments on herself in the afterword. And at the end of it all, none of it seems to have mattered very much--less in the sense of the project that created the sisters being a failure (as it could only have been; how could the Caryatids have possibly done the job asked of them?) than in its becoming irrelevant as the world moves on. So there we are on page two hundred and ninety-five with a piece of future-oriented science fiction dismissing future-oriented science fiction except as a matter of "telling stories," in what can easily be taken for a cop-out at the end of the long, meandering journey--as well as a dismissal of the catastrophe he spent so much time describing since we just somehow got out of it.
Not that we haven't seen this before in Sterling's work. Like his short story "The Sword of Damocles" (perhaps the one I enjoyed least) The Caryatids plays the familiar po-mo game of telling a story by finding ever-more elaborate ways of telling us that it can't tell the story, not really. Admittedly this approach has its merits where the apocalyptic is concerned (as Kurt Vonnegut demonstrated in Slaughterhouse-Five over four decades ago). Nonetheless, po-mo is all too often a rationalization of evasion, and even an excuse for sloppiness, which we do see a surprising bit of here at the sentence-level. The stylistic excesses common to '80s cyberpunk--the sentences heavily freighted with flashy sciency-techie jargon and neologisms, the emphasis on description that is at once image-dense and oblique (which irritated me to no end when I first started reading it; early on I mentally compared it to reading Ezra Pound in neon lights)--can be exhilarating when done well. There are times when it works here, but the necessary editing has fallen short, a point particularly evident in the tendency to repeat a key detail within the space of a few pages.
As much of an issue as the manner of the telling are the intellectual tools that po-mo offers. Sterling has long drawn on a blend of two particular strains of postmodern thought--the corporate-globalizing, libertarian, "New Economy" outlook of Wired magazine and the Davos World Economic Forum, and the "linguistic turn"-shaped approach to cultural studies fashionable on university campuses in recent decades. It's a rare combination, but a natural one, given the underappreciated commonalities between them. Alas, neither has much to offer that's of real use in dealing with the book's central problem, with the result that there is more dancing around and dismissal of the problem of climate change than genuine grappling with it. Some interesting ideas do crop up here and there along the way, and the book is never dull, but as a statement "of faith in the power of human intellect, creativity and spirit to overcome any obstacle" promised in the blurb on the jacket, let alone a treatment of this particular subject, The Caryatids is underwhelming.
The SyFy Channel: Year One
It has been over a year since the Sci-Fi Channel rebranded itself The Syfy Channel. (The changeover, about which I had plenty to say last year, happened on Tuesday July 7, 2009.) The new direction appears to be simply more of the same-which is to say, more of the channel giving science fiction fans the finger.
Of course, fans had cause for complaint a long time before that, particularly regarding the original programming. Entertainment Weekly in fact carried an open letter back in January 2008 lamenting the lack of quality content.
The letter's author, Marc Bernardin, asked simply why in this "Age of the Geek, where pop culture has finally come around to our way of thinking," when the audience could not be more primed for material like television adaptations of "the Foundation saga, or Ender’s Game, or Footfall, or The Man in the High Castle, or The Forever War" the channel is not so awesome, instead "offering them Ghost Hunters International and crappy 'original movies' like Mansquito?"
Bernardin's complaints in the letter are a milder version of sentiments that seem unanimous among those who haunt the channel's comments pages, not that the network pays them any heed--perhaps even taking the disapproval as a sign that it's on the right track and should stay the course.
After all, I've long been giving two answers to questions like Bernardin asked. The first is that it is easy to make too much of the "Age of the Geek," the hardcore audience for quality speculative material remaining comparatively limited—so much so that the life of science fiction shows on network television is almost always short and tenuous.
In short, geeks are still not regarded as an attractive market by broadcasters.
The second reason is that just about every other cable channel has long since abandoned the occupation of a niche to pursue a bigger audience--generally by straying wildly from its ostensible specialty, and typically through the cheapest (and most synergistic) programming possible. The History Channel, for instance, is now largely devoted to pop science shows that may "pass" as natural history but would really be more at home on the Discovery Channel, disaster porn, documentaries about the paranormal (e.g. UFOs, cryptozoology and apocalyptic prophecies), Masonic conspiracies, and reality television about pawn brokers and the like (the slogan being "History Made Everyday"). American Movie Classics (or AMC) no longer runs old movies, just the same stuff you might catch on FX, USA, TNT and the rest of the basic cable line-up, while prominently featuring an original TV show that looks like the movies it used to run-the costume drama Mad Men (the big draw of which seems to be the chance to laugh at how crassly bigoted and unhealthily self-indulgent people used to be, while envying them for it--more on which in a future posting).
Since-again-geeks are not a highly sought after market (perhaps because of their intelligence as well as their small numbers), SyFy was particularly quick to do this. The most obvious sign of the shift was a turn to reality programming such as Bernardin mentioned--by definition, something the channel should have had nothing to do with. It's been over a decade since the channel brought on Crossing Over With John Edwards (yes, it actually premiered way back in 1999) and the hidden camera show Scare Tactics (2003-). Unfortunately, the trend only accelerated, so that the channel gave over many of its Tuesdays to such programming (as well as wrestling, which in its current incarnation at ten P.M. enjoys by far the most stable slot in the whole line-up), while fully devoting its Wednesdays to Ghost Hunters and spin-offs and variations thereof.
Additionally, while there has long been a tilt toward the formulaic in the channel's movies-of-the-week, the variety on offer has shrunk, and low-grade horror (e.g. Mansquito) has been grossly overrepresented in the resulting mix. (I thought at first that my not being a horror fan made the genre seem irritatingly ubiquitous. The enormous number of hours devoted to frequent reruns of lengthy miniseries based on Stephen King properties--like The Stand, or The Langoliers--for instance, are a particular pet peeve of mine (as are the numerous hours also devoted to movies about serial killers, psycho killers and the like, their thematic appropriateness shaky given that they contain no actual speculative element at all). However, clearly it has occurred to others because the question "Why so much horror on SyFy?" actually appears as number five on the channel's FAQ. The not-terribly-informative answer is an acknowledgement that "there is a lot of horror programming on Syfy," though they also "try to maintain a balance between sci-fi, fantasy and horror in order to present a wide variety of programs in these related genres.")
The monster movie, particularly the kind where something in the woods or the water menaces a small town, the kind where mad and bad scientists get killed by creatures they have created or unleashed or pursued and couples are attacked during intimate moments, is the principal staple--and of these it suffices to say that the sequels to Anaconda aired here (parts three and four in 2008 and 2009) actually make the 1997 original look like a masterpiece by comparison. Occasionally there's a spin on the material, the writers bumping the monster to a more exotic setting--perhaps a historical one, as with 2008's Warbirds--or combining it with a different plot--for instance, an archaeological mystery, as in 2007's Sands of Oblivion, or 2008's Monster Ark. Nonetheless, it comes to the same thing in the end, most of the time.
Less common, but certainly conspicuous among the offerings are disaster films where earnest scientists are earnestly trying to persuade earnest government and military officials to earnestly DO SOMETHING, and/or disparate strangers suddenly come together to confront a common danger and all end up being better people for it--like 2006's Earthstorm, or oft-rerun miniseries like 10.5: Apocalypse (alas, a far cry from the real-life responses we've seen to events like Katrina).
Every once in a while we get an effort to do something more (Rafael Jordan penning a fair number of these, like 2009's The Immortal Voyage of Captain Drake). Nonetheless, such exceptions are just that, exceptions, and even the big "event" miniseries reflected the same tilt toward simpler material these past several years--5ive Days to Midnight (2004), The Triangle (2005) and The Lost Room (2006) rather than the two miniseries based on Frank Herbert's Dune novels (2000's Dune and 2003's Children of Dune), which seem to have represented the channel's high-water mark.
Now? The ubiquitous Ghost Hunters are moving from dominating Wednesday nights to a good many daytime line-ups as well, with the channel's marathons of reruns during weekdays, and even holidays (like the Halloween marathon last year)--some channel executive obviously thinking that every day should be Ghost Hunter's day (as opposed to absolutely no days, as many viewers would prefer). Thursday too is being given over to reality television as well with Mary Knows Best, and Fact or Faked--still more airtime given over to the daily life of a family of shameless nit-wits, and to people talking about videos they found on the Internet, respectively.
Meanwhile, the channel increasingly revels in with self-consciously bad offerings like MegaPiranha (2010) (apparently intended to top last year's MegaShark vs. Giant Octopus), and the channel's more recent "Become a B-Movie Mogul" gimmick. There is, too, the heavy reliance on the output of Asylum Films--the primary audience for which seems to be, apart from those who seek out Kickpuncher-style risibility, video buyers and renters who confuse their titles with those of the better films they're ripping off. ("Was it Transformers, or Transmorphers? I always get those two confused!")
The latest miniseries have not fared much better. The recent takes on Philip Jose Farmer's Riverworld (which struck me as less intriguing and epic than the two-hour pilot the channel presented but never followed up seven years ago, despite a couple of interesting twists) and classic comic strip hero The Phantom (disappointingly flat) seem to represent the current standard.
There has been a similar (if subtler) reorientation in the dwindling number of dramatic series on offer, away from the risky choices occasionally seen in past years (a show like Lexx or perhaps even Farscape would today be unthinkable) toward safer bets; from exotic (e.g. futuristic or otherworldly) settings, mind-bending concepts and large-scale, epic storytelling to "everyday," contemporary milieus, and conceptually lighter fare intended not to win deep loyalty from sophisticated SFTV viewers, but to attract as much of a more general audience as it possibly can. (In short, Syfy seems to make its choices more like the major networks do.)
For the time being let's set aside the British imports on which the channel has increasingly relied like Dr. Who and Primeval (as the channel really doesn't have much to do with them, and often isn't even the first to air them in the U.S. market), and the deservedly short-lived Outer Space Astronauts (every bit as cheap as it looks). The two most conventionally "science fiction-al" series are of course Stargate: Universe, and Caprica, but both reflect the pattern. Each is a spin-off of well-established franchises Sci-Fi/Syfy has run successfully in the recent past, and go on treading a well-beaten path (even when it's a different well-beaten path).
When I first heard about SGU my first thought was of Star Trek: Voyager. When I first saw the promotions, I changed my mind--in contrast with the two earlier series, which hewed as closely to Star Trek-style conventions as any television space opera I can remember--likely the reason why the Stargate franchise came closest to Star Trek in terms of durability and popularity--the Stargate concept was being redone as "Galactica Lite."
I don't think I was far off the mark there. The basic similarity in the setup aside, the episodes focus on the protagonists' grim struggle to survive, the tensions among the ship's dominant factions and personalities, and the baggage of the central characters, which is so heavy that it often feels like the writers are just piling it on in the name of Drama. This is all the more problematic as few of the characters are really compelling, which was also a frequent problem with BSG (where the writers often seemed to confuse simply unlikable with complex).
Nicholas Rush (Robert Carlyle) never becomes more than a raving, bullying egomaniac, the attempts to show "another side" to him never quite geling while at the same time the attempts to draw the viewer into his obsession--arguably key to making the character really work--fall flat. (And frankly, isn't it sad that the anti-intellectual xenophobia implicit in making the "mad" scientist a foreigner remains so strong? Then again, I suppose a working-class Scot is less of a cliché than a contender for the "Upper Class Twit of the Year" Award, or worse still, a Central European with a thick accent.) The stereotyped geekiness of Eli Wallace (David Blue) comes across as a patronizing attempt to pander to what SyFy chiefs visualize as their justifiably disgruntled "traditional" audience. Matthew Scott (Brian J. Smith) is a wimp and a nut and a jerk. His hold on the affections of not one but two women who appear as stable as anyone else in this interstellar mental hospital--Elyse Levesque's Chloe Armstrong and Julia Benson's underutilized Vanessa James (recently recognized by a Leo Award and one of the few genuinely sympathetic characters in the group)--seems utterly incomprehensible.
Ming-Na said in early interviews that her character Camille Wray might well prove to be the bane of the series for many a viewer. In this company Camille would have to try a lot harder to accomplish that.
Additionally, there can be only so many episodes about someone trying to take over the ship, a trope that was wearing thin by the end of Galactica, and has already been heavily used here. (I'd hate to think the show will go in the same direction as Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, in which just about every possible spin on this was tried, including leprechauns and giant alien brains. But I can't rule it out at this time.)
Still, the writers get more out of their premise than might be expected, supplying a number of entertaining (if not always plausible) plot twists, starting with the way they got Wallace on the ship in the first place. Dr. Rush's games with the rest of the crew proved cleverer and more engaging than I'd expected. While I'm still waiting for the show which will handle the body-switch trope with the wit the great Robert Sheckley managed a full half-century ago in classics like Mindswap, SGU handles this part of its situation with comparative intelligence, getting more than the usual cheap laughs out of it. And while I admit to missing the Golden Age galactic empire fun of English-speaking aliens played by actors in rubber masks and giant space battles (after the pilot episode, we never see one until the second half of season 1), the show takes a more nuanced approach to its alien encounters, with fair results (legacies from the two previous Stargate shows, like the Lucian Alliance, apart).
It helps too that SGU abandons (or at least downplays) much of what I disliked most about Galactica--its one-dimensional hewing to Frankenstein complex clichés, its mashing of political buttons (especially its clumsy, sensationalist attempts to exploit the "War on Terror" in its storylines), and (with a few exceptions) its nonsensical religious elements. Instead the channel saved those things for the Galactica prequel, Caprica, which is founded completely on those things--starting with a scene of private school uniform-clad teenagers engaged in rather dark play in a virtual-cyberspace setting, right after which we get a religiously-inspired suicide bombing, events that dominate everything which follows. On top of this, it totally chucks the space battles (the thing the show actually did well, even if it only means so much when nothing else is working), going for television's first "science fiction dynastic drama"--a nighttime soap opera where the characters simply happen to call their alcoholic beverages "ambrosia." To its producers' credit the production is slick and stylish, and full of able actors, but I found "Crapica" an irritating waste of time.
Something of that spin-off quality is also part of Sanctuary as well. Not only did it originally air as a web-based series, but it also happens to be largely the work of the same team which made Stargate, most visibly a now dark-haired Amanda Tapping as Dr. Helen Magnus, head of an international organization working to protect (and in cases, contain) mutant Abnormals out of fortress-like "Sanctuary" compounds around the world.
I enjoyed Sanctuary's touch of steampunk, and increasingly, the flexibility with action and setting afforded by the computer-generated imagery, but found it hampered by many a bad script. While sometimes coming up with interesting bits, the writers don't seem to have ever met a cliché they didn't find irresistible, resorting to many particularly overdone ideas very early on--a "we're stranded in a desolate place and one of us is a killer" episode ("The Kush"), the inevitable "underground mutant fight club" episode ("Warriors"), and in season two, a "we meet hardened post-apocalyptic versions of ourselves" episode ("Pavor Nocturnus"). I'm also staggered by how bad some of the acting is. (Robin Dunne is often embarrassingly awful as Dr. Will Zimmermann, and I really don't care for Jonathan Young's Nikola Tesla.)
Still, as stated above, SGU and Caprica (and even Sanctuary) can best be taken as representative of the channel's earlier direction. Sci-Fi, after all, picked up the Stargate franchise back in 2002, the remake of BSG in 2003. By contrast Eureka and Warehouse 13—currently the flagship, launched on the day of the channel's name change—are more strongly reflective of the new thrust.
Echoing parent channel USA's fondness for crime shows, the format common to Eureka and Warehouse 13--and also the new Haven--is as follows: a law enforcement officer stumbles into an out-of-the-way place full of eccentric characters and little mysteries which supply the plots of the episodes. In Eureka, it's Federal Marshall Jack Carter (whose name I suspected was a lazy combination of the names of the leads in Stargate: SG-1) stumbling into the job of sheriff of the Global Dynamics corporation's company town/research center in the Pacific Northwest. In Warehouse 13, it's Secret Service agents Peter Lattimer (Eddie McClintock) and Myka Bering (Joanne Kelly) who stumble into jobs at a secret government archive storing historical artifacts of magical significance (this show's fantasy apparently a foil to Eureka's "hard" science). In Haven it's FBI agent Audrey Parker (Emily Rose) winding up in the town of Haven, Maine, where just about all the locals seem to be touched by the supernatural in one way or another. (Even Sanctuary, with its stronger action-adventure and science fiction elements, follows the pattern, its story starting with forensic psychiatrist Dr. Zimmerman being recruited to the team of the titular base.)
Eureka was the first of the bunch of course. To paraphrase William Gibson, the future has already arrived in the titular town, but just not been distributed beyond its limits, and just about every resident is the would-be hero of their own quirky Edisonade. Given the show's reliance on a notion of technological R & D which was already looking outdated as the Victorian era drew to a close, Eureka is mostly a pile of nonsense. And predictably many of the residents of this "smartest little town" are irritiating--the insufferable Nathan Stark (Ed Quinn), the smug Tess Fontana (Jaime Ray Newman) and Zane Donovan (Niall Matter), the nebbish Douglas Fargo (Neil Grayston). Still, the show does manage the occasional entertaining gimmick, and not all the characters fare so badly. Joe Morton, by this point an old hand at playing science guys, pulls off the friendly mechanic/all-around scientific genius act with aplomb, and Salli-Richardson-Whitfield fares well in her role as Allison Blake. Colin Ferguson is appropriately clueless as Jack Carter, and Jordan Hinson as his daughter Zoe manages to be difficult without being wearying.
The promos for season four hint that the protagonists they've gone back to the '40s for a bit of dieselpunk/atompunk and the stylish noir-swing look and feel that still has a powerful hold on pop culture, which may yet extend such interest as it has (though frankly the show has already done the tweaked timeline thing before).
In Warehouse 13 the principals don't have a town full of characters to play off of, but the artifacts gathered in the titular building instead. Unfortunately the literary and historical allusions are as shallow as they are abundant. The show has been criticized by many as highly derivative of Friday the 13th: The Series, and while I can't comment on that, not having seen a single episode of that '80s-era show, Warehouse certainly does reuse some well-worn plots, some of them recently used by other SyFy Channel originals--as in the recent "Mild Mannered," in which the duo go after a geek whose playing superhero has become a danger to the public (a story Eureka told not long before in "Phased and Confused"). Where the execution is concerned, the goofy sloppiness of episodes like "Magnetism" is rather more common than the inventiveness and depth of "Resonance," and the results are rather forgettable on the whole.
Where the main characters are concerned, what we've got is the same odd couple cop set-up we've all seen a billion times before, complete with a counterstereotype that is by this point just another stereotype (namely the well-worn "twist" that it's the man who's intuitive and the woman who's logical, a combo pulled off more sharply by Mulder and Scully way back when). It doesn't help that Lattimer so often seems oafish--and even just plain dumb--rather than "intuitive." Still, in their favor it can be said that Joanne Kelly displays genuine charm as Myka, the two don't spend their whole time irritating the hell out of each other, and the writing and acting rise to the occasion during the odd couple's periodic moments of human connection, in which there's an actual chemistry and warmth. (Most of the other core cast and characters are all right too, excepting Allison Scagliotti's snarky Claudia Donovan, whose every zinger is a clinker. Personally, I blame the writers.)
The result has so far been watchable in a "turn-your-brain-off" kind of way, but the second season premiere makes me wonder if things will get worse rather than better. While the characters and their relationships acquired a bit more nuance as the series proceeded, little else has, and the Big Surprise--that "H.G. Wells is a woman--and a villain!"--struck me as particularly stupid. (Admittedly I've never been able to work up much interest over "Did Shakespeare really write his plays?"-style authorship games, and my familiarity with Wells' work--I actually devoted a fair chunk of my dissertation to it--may make me overcritical of the lobotomized, just-making-stuff-up way this was all handled. But I can't be the only one who felt this was especially witless.) That the writers seem to be setting Ms. Wells (Jaime Murray) up as not just a recurring character, but a nemesis for the protagonists, strikes me as unpromising indeed.
I have less to say about the newest entry into the line-up, Haven. I'm not familiar with the source material, Steven King's The Colorado Kid (though I'll admit to having been less than thrilled when I first heard that King will get still more air time here). Additionally just two episodes have aired to date, apparently out of order. (The second, "Butterfly," is listed on the Internet Movie Database as the season's third.) However, it appears to be more grounded and less flashy than Eureka or Warehouse 13 (the titular town--yes, I'm using "titular" a lot here, but that does seem to be the pattern--puts me more in mind of Northern Exposure or Picket Fences than Eureka), while also having crisper writing and some darker touches. It also appears to be working its way toward an arc.
In sum, at the end of Year One there is still some entertainment for genre fans, but it's buried in an increasing amount of dross, while the range of product has continued to narrow in favor of more "mainstream" fare (as the course taken from Eureka to Haven demonstrates) at the expense of the sorts of stuff hardcore fans want and reasonably expect from a channel ostensibly devoted to the genre. Airlock Alpha writer Dennis Rayburn recently commented (in response to the decision to bump the original dramas from their longtime Friday night slot in October to make room for channel's real pride and joy, wrestling, when the WWE's Smackdown arrives there),
Of course, fans had cause for complaint a long time before that, particularly regarding the original programming. Entertainment Weekly in fact carried an open letter back in January 2008 lamenting the lack of quality content.
The letter's author, Marc Bernardin, asked simply why in this "Age of the Geek, where pop culture has finally come around to our way of thinking," when the audience could not be more primed for material like television adaptations of "the Foundation saga, or Ender’s Game, or Footfall, or The Man in the High Castle, or The Forever War" the channel is not so awesome, instead "offering them Ghost Hunters International and crappy 'original movies' like Mansquito?"
Bernardin's complaints in the letter are a milder version of sentiments that seem unanimous among those who haunt the channel's comments pages, not that the network pays them any heed--perhaps even taking the disapproval as a sign that it's on the right track and should stay the course.
After all, I've long been giving two answers to questions like Bernardin asked. The first is that it is easy to make too much of the "Age of the Geek," the hardcore audience for quality speculative material remaining comparatively limited—so much so that the life of science fiction shows on network television is almost always short and tenuous.
In short, geeks are still not regarded as an attractive market by broadcasters.
The second reason is that just about every other cable channel has long since abandoned the occupation of a niche to pursue a bigger audience--generally by straying wildly from its ostensible specialty, and typically through the cheapest (and most synergistic) programming possible. The History Channel, for instance, is now largely devoted to pop science shows that may "pass" as natural history but would really be more at home on the Discovery Channel, disaster porn, documentaries about the paranormal (e.g. UFOs, cryptozoology and apocalyptic prophecies), Masonic conspiracies, and reality television about pawn brokers and the like (the slogan being "History Made Everyday"). American Movie Classics (or AMC) no longer runs old movies, just the same stuff you might catch on FX, USA, TNT and the rest of the basic cable line-up, while prominently featuring an original TV show that looks like the movies it used to run-the costume drama Mad Men (the big draw of which seems to be the chance to laugh at how crassly bigoted and unhealthily self-indulgent people used to be, while envying them for it--more on which in a future posting).
Since-again-geeks are not a highly sought after market (perhaps because of their intelligence as well as their small numbers), SyFy was particularly quick to do this. The most obvious sign of the shift was a turn to reality programming such as Bernardin mentioned--by definition, something the channel should have had nothing to do with. It's been over a decade since the channel brought on Crossing Over With John Edwards (yes, it actually premiered way back in 1999) and the hidden camera show Scare Tactics (2003-). Unfortunately, the trend only accelerated, so that the channel gave over many of its Tuesdays to such programming (as well as wrestling, which in its current incarnation at ten P.M. enjoys by far the most stable slot in the whole line-up), while fully devoting its Wednesdays to Ghost Hunters and spin-offs and variations thereof.
Additionally, while there has long been a tilt toward the formulaic in the channel's movies-of-the-week, the variety on offer has shrunk, and low-grade horror (e.g. Mansquito) has been grossly overrepresented in the resulting mix. (I thought at first that my not being a horror fan made the genre seem irritatingly ubiquitous. The enormous number of hours devoted to frequent reruns of lengthy miniseries based on Stephen King properties--like The Stand, or The Langoliers--for instance, are a particular pet peeve of mine (as are the numerous hours also devoted to movies about serial killers, psycho killers and the like, their thematic appropriateness shaky given that they contain no actual speculative element at all). However, clearly it has occurred to others because the question "Why so much horror on SyFy?" actually appears as number five on the channel's FAQ. The not-terribly-informative answer is an acknowledgement that "there is a lot of horror programming on Syfy," though they also "try to maintain a balance between sci-fi, fantasy and horror in order to present a wide variety of programs in these related genres.")
The monster movie, particularly the kind where something in the woods or the water menaces a small town, the kind where mad and bad scientists get killed by creatures they have created or unleashed or pursued and couples are attacked during intimate moments, is the principal staple--and of these it suffices to say that the sequels to Anaconda aired here (parts three and four in 2008 and 2009) actually make the 1997 original look like a masterpiece by comparison. Occasionally there's a spin on the material, the writers bumping the monster to a more exotic setting--perhaps a historical one, as with 2008's Warbirds--or combining it with a different plot--for instance, an archaeological mystery, as in 2007's Sands of Oblivion, or 2008's Monster Ark. Nonetheless, it comes to the same thing in the end, most of the time.
Less common, but certainly conspicuous among the offerings are disaster films where earnest scientists are earnestly trying to persuade earnest government and military officials to earnestly DO SOMETHING, and/or disparate strangers suddenly come together to confront a common danger and all end up being better people for it--like 2006's Earthstorm, or oft-rerun miniseries like 10.5: Apocalypse (alas, a far cry from the real-life responses we've seen to events like Katrina).
Every once in a while we get an effort to do something more (Rafael Jordan penning a fair number of these, like 2009's The Immortal Voyage of Captain Drake). Nonetheless, such exceptions are just that, exceptions, and even the big "event" miniseries reflected the same tilt toward simpler material these past several years--5ive Days to Midnight (2004), The Triangle (2005) and The Lost Room (2006) rather than the two miniseries based on Frank Herbert's Dune novels (2000's Dune and 2003's Children of Dune), which seem to have represented the channel's high-water mark.
Now? The ubiquitous Ghost Hunters are moving from dominating Wednesday nights to a good many daytime line-ups as well, with the channel's marathons of reruns during weekdays, and even holidays (like the Halloween marathon last year)--some channel executive obviously thinking that every day should be Ghost Hunter's day (as opposed to absolutely no days, as many viewers would prefer). Thursday too is being given over to reality television as well with Mary Knows Best, and Fact or Faked--still more airtime given over to the daily life of a family of shameless nit-wits, and to people talking about videos they found on the Internet, respectively.
Meanwhile, the channel increasingly revels in with self-consciously bad offerings like MegaPiranha (2010) (apparently intended to top last year's MegaShark vs. Giant Octopus), and the channel's more recent "Become a B-Movie Mogul" gimmick. There is, too, the heavy reliance on the output of Asylum Films--the primary audience for which seems to be, apart from those who seek out Kickpuncher-style risibility, video buyers and renters who confuse their titles with those of the better films they're ripping off. ("Was it Transformers, or Transmorphers? I always get those two confused!")
The latest miniseries have not fared much better. The recent takes on Philip Jose Farmer's Riverworld (which struck me as less intriguing and epic than the two-hour pilot the channel presented but never followed up seven years ago, despite a couple of interesting twists) and classic comic strip hero The Phantom (disappointingly flat) seem to represent the current standard.
There has been a similar (if subtler) reorientation in the dwindling number of dramatic series on offer, away from the risky choices occasionally seen in past years (a show like Lexx or perhaps even Farscape would today be unthinkable) toward safer bets; from exotic (e.g. futuristic or otherworldly) settings, mind-bending concepts and large-scale, epic storytelling to "everyday," contemporary milieus, and conceptually lighter fare intended not to win deep loyalty from sophisticated SFTV viewers, but to attract as much of a more general audience as it possibly can. (In short, Syfy seems to make its choices more like the major networks do.)
For the time being let's set aside the British imports on which the channel has increasingly relied like Dr. Who and Primeval (as the channel really doesn't have much to do with them, and often isn't even the first to air them in the U.S. market), and the deservedly short-lived Outer Space Astronauts (every bit as cheap as it looks). The two most conventionally "science fiction-al" series are of course Stargate: Universe, and Caprica, but both reflect the pattern. Each is a spin-off of well-established franchises Sci-Fi/Syfy has run successfully in the recent past, and go on treading a well-beaten path (even when it's a different well-beaten path).
When I first heard about SGU my first thought was of Star Trek: Voyager. When I first saw the promotions, I changed my mind--in contrast with the two earlier series, which hewed as closely to Star Trek-style conventions as any television space opera I can remember--likely the reason why the Stargate franchise came closest to Star Trek in terms of durability and popularity--the Stargate concept was being redone as "Galactica Lite."
I don't think I was far off the mark there. The basic similarity in the setup aside, the episodes focus on the protagonists' grim struggle to survive, the tensions among the ship's dominant factions and personalities, and the baggage of the central characters, which is so heavy that it often feels like the writers are just piling it on in the name of Drama. This is all the more problematic as few of the characters are really compelling, which was also a frequent problem with BSG (where the writers often seemed to confuse simply unlikable with complex).
Nicholas Rush (Robert Carlyle) never becomes more than a raving, bullying egomaniac, the attempts to show "another side" to him never quite geling while at the same time the attempts to draw the viewer into his obsession--arguably key to making the character really work--fall flat. (And frankly, isn't it sad that the anti-intellectual xenophobia implicit in making the "mad" scientist a foreigner remains so strong? Then again, I suppose a working-class Scot is less of a cliché than a contender for the "Upper Class Twit of the Year" Award, or worse still, a Central European with a thick accent.) The stereotyped geekiness of Eli Wallace (David Blue) comes across as a patronizing attempt to pander to what SyFy chiefs visualize as their justifiably disgruntled "traditional" audience. Matthew Scott (Brian J. Smith) is a wimp and a nut and a jerk. His hold on the affections of not one but two women who appear as stable as anyone else in this interstellar mental hospital--Elyse Levesque's Chloe Armstrong and Julia Benson's underutilized Vanessa James (recently recognized by a Leo Award and one of the few genuinely sympathetic characters in the group)--seems utterly incomprehensible.
Ming-Na said in early interviews that her character Camille Wray might well prove to be the bane of the series for many a viewer. In this company Camille would have to try a lot harder to accomplish that.
Additionally, there can be only so many episodes about someone trying to take over the ship, a trope that was wearing thin by the end of Galactica, and has already been heavily used here. (I'd hate to think the show will go in the same direction as Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, in which just about every possible spin on this was tried, including leprechauns and giant alien brains. But I can't rule it out at this time.)
Still, the writers get more out of their premise than might be expected, supplying a number of entertaining (if not always plausible) plot twists, starting with the way they got Wallace on the ship in the first place. Dr. Rush's games with the rest of the crew proved cleverer and more engaging than I'd expected. While I'm still waiting for the show which will handle the body-switch trope with the wit the great Robert Sheckley managed a full half-century ago in classics like Mindswap, SGU handles this part of its situation with comparative intelligence, getting more than the usual cheap laughs out of it. And while I admit to missing the Golden Age galactic empire fun of English-speaking aliens played by actors in rubber masks and giant space battles (after the pilot episode, we never see one until the second half of season 1), the show takes a more nuanced approach to its alien encounters, with fair results (legacies from the two previous Stargate shows, like the Lucian Alliance, apart).
It helps too that SGU abandons (or at least downplays) much of what I disliked most about Galactica--its one-dimensional hewing to Frankenstein complex clichés, its mashing of political buttons (especially its clumsy, sensationalist attempts to exploit the "War on Terror" in its storylines), and (with a few exceptions) its nonsensical religious elements. Instead the channel saved those things for the Galactica prequel, Caprica, which is founded completely on those things--starting with a scene of private school uniform-clad teenagers engaged in rather dark play in a virtual-cyberspace setting, right after which we get a religiously-inspired suicide bombing, events that dominate everything which follows. On top of this, it totally chucks the space battles (the thing the show actually did well, even if it only means so much when nothing else is working), going for television's first "science fiction dynastic drama"--a nighttime soap opera where the characters simply happen to call their alcoholic beverages "ambrosia." To its producers' credit the production is slick and stylish, and full of able actors, but I found "Crapica" an irritating waste of time.
Something of that spin-off quality is also part of Sanctuary as well. Not only did it originally air as a web-based series, but it also happens to be largely the work of the same team which made Stargate, most visibly a now dark-haired Amanda Tapping as Dr. Helen Magnus, head of an international organization working to protect (and in cases, contain) mutant Abnormals out of fortress-like "Sanctuary" compounds around the world.
I enjoyed Sanctuary's touch of steampunk, and increasingly, the flexibility with action and setting afforded by the computer-generated imagery, but found it hampered by many a bad script. While sometimes coming up with interesting bits, the writers don't seem to have ever met a cliché they didn't find irresistible, resorting to many particularly overdone ideas very early on--a "we're stranded in a desolate place and one of us is a killer" episode ("The Kush"), the inevitable "underground mutant fight club" episode ("Warriors"), and in season two, a "we meet hardened post-apocalyptic versions of ourselves" episode ("Pavor Nocturnus"). I'm also staggered by how bad some of the acting is. (Robin Dunne is often embarrassingly awful as Dr. Will Zimmermann, and I really don't care for Jonathan Young's Nikola Tesla.)
Still, as stated above, SGU and Caprica (and even Sanctuary) can best be taken as representative of the channel's earlier direction. Sci-Fi, after all, picked up the Stargate franchise back in 2002, the remake of BSG in 2003. By contrast Eureka and Warehouse 13—currently the flagship, launched on the day of the channel's name change—are more strongly reflective of the new thrust.
Echoing parent channel USA's fondness for crime shows, the format common to Eureka and Warehouse 13--and also the new Haven--is as follows: a law enforcement officer stumbles into an out-of-the-way place full of eccentric characters and little mysteries which supply the plots of the episodes. In Eureka, it's Federal Marshall Jack Carter (whose name I suspected was a lazy combination of the names of the leads in Stargate: SG-1) stumbling into the job of sheriff of the Global Dynamics corporation's company town/research center in the Pacific Northwest. In Warehouse 13, it's Secret Service agents Peter Lattimer (Eddie McClintock) and Myka Bering (Joanne Kelly) who stumble into jobs at a secret government archive storing historical artifacts of magical significance (this show's fantasy apparently a foil to Eureka's "hard" science). In Haven it's FBI agent Audrey Parker (Emily Rose) winding up in the town of Haven, Maine, where just about all the locals seem to be touched by the supernatural in one way or another. (Even Sanctuary, with its stronger action-adventure and science fiction elements, follows the pattern, its story starting with forensic psychiatrist Dr. Zimmerman being recruited to the team of the titular base.)
Eureka was the first of the bunch of course. To paraphrase William Gibson, the future has already arrived in the titular town, but just not been distributed beyond its limits, and just about every resident is the would-be hero of their own quirky Edisonade. Given the show's reliance on a notion of technological R & D which was already looking outdated as the Victorian era drew to a close, Eureka is mostly a pile of nonsense. And predictably many of the residents of this "smartest little town" are irritiating--the insufferable Nathan Stark (Ed Quinn), the smug Tess Fontana (Jaime Ray Newman) and Zane Donovan (Niall Matter), the nebbish Douglas Fargo (Neil Grayston). Still, the show does manage the occasional entertaining gimmick, and not all the characters fare so badly. Joe Morton, by this point an old hand at playing science guys, pulls off the friendly mechanic/all-around scientific genius act with aplomb, and Salli-Richardson-Whitfield fares well in her role as Allison Blake. Colin Ferguson is appropriately clueless as Jack Carter, and Jordan Hinson as his daughter Zoe manages to be difficult without being wearying.
The promos for season four hint that the protagonists they've gone back to the '40s for a bit of dieselpunk/atompunk and the stylish noir-swing look and feel that still has a powerful hold on pop culture, which may yet extend such interest as it has (though frankly the show has already done the tweaked timeline thing before).
In Warehouse 13 the principals don't have a town full of characters to play off of, but the artifacts gathered in the titular building instead. Unfortunately the literary and historical allusions are as shallow as they are abundant. The show has been criticized by many as highly derivative of Friday the 13th: The Series, and while I can't comment on that, not having seen a single episode of that '80s-era show, Warehouse certainly does reuse some well-worn plots, some of them recently used by other SyFy Channel originals--as in the recent "Mild Mannered," in which the duo go after a geek whose playing superhero has become a danger to the public (a story Eureka told not long before in "Phased and Confused"). Where the execution is concerned, the goofy sloppiness of episodes like "Magnetism" is rather more common than the inventiveness and depth of "Resonance," and the results are rather forgettable on the whole.
Where the main characters are concerned, what we've got is the same odd couple cop set-up we've all seen a billion times before, complete with a counterstereotype that is by this point just another stereotype (namely the well-worn "twist" that it's the man who's intuitive and the woman who's logical, a combo pulled off more sharply by Mulder and Scully way back when). It doesn't help that Lattimer so often seems oafish--and even just plain dumb--rather than "intuitive." Still, in their favor it can be said that Joanne Kelly displays genuine charm as Myka, the two don't spend their whole time irritating the hell out of each other, and the writing and acting rise to the occasion during the odd couple's periodic moments of human connection, in which there's an actual chemistry and warmth. (Most of the other core cast and characters are all right too, excepting Allison Scagliotti's snarky Claudia Donovan, whose every zinger is a clinker. Personally, I blame the writers.)
The result has so far been watchable in a "turn-your-brain-off" kind of way, but the second season premiere makes me wonder if things will get worse rather than better. While the characters and their relationships acquired a bit more nuance as the series proceeded, little else has, and the Big Surprise--that "H.G. Wells is a woman--and a villain!"--struck me as particularly stupid. (Admittedly I've never been able to work up much interest over "Did Shakespeare really write his plays?"-style authorship games, and my familiarity with Wells' work--I actually devoted a fair chunk of my dissertation to it--may make me overcritical of the lobotomized, just-making-stuff-up way this was all handled. But I can't be the only one who felt this was especially witless.) That the writers seem to be setting Ms. Wells (Jaime Murray) up as not just a recurring character, but a nemesis for the protagonists, strikes me as unpromising indeed.
I have less to say about the newest entry into the line-up, Haven. I'm not familiar with the source material, Steven King's The Colorado Kid (though I'll admit to having been less than thrilled when I first heard that King will get still more air time here). Additionally just two episodes have aired to date, apparently out of order. (The second, "Butterfly," is listed on the Internet Movie Database as the season's third.) However, it appears to be more grounded and less flashy than Eureka or Warehouse 13 (the titular town--yes, I'm using "titular" a lot here, but that does seem to be the pattern--puts me more in mind of Northern Exposure or Picket Fences than Eureka), while also having crisper writing and some darker touches. It also appears to be working its way toward an arc.
In sum, at the end of Year One there is still some entertainment for genre fans, but it's buried in an increasing amount of dross, while the range of product has continued to narrow in favor of more "mainstream" fare (as the course taken from Eureka to Haven demonstrates) at the expense of the sorts of stuff hardcore fans want and reasonably expect from a channel ostensibly devoted to the genre. Airlock Alpha writer Dennis Rayburn recently commented (in response to the decision to bump the original dramas from their longtime Friday night slot in October to make room for channel's real pride and joy, wrestling, when the WWE's Smackdown arrives there),
when SciFi Channel made its famous, (or infamous depending on how you look at it and study it), name change to Syfy, many writers on the Internet predicted that this was the first step toward turning the channel into another USA network and away from the vision that created it. I fear we are seeing it happen, one hour at a time.Can anyone really dispute that now?
Friday, April 23, 2010
The June 2010 Hayakawa S-F Magazine
The June 2010 issue of Hayakawa's S-F Magazine (Japan's premier science fiction magazine), appearing tomorrow, is devoted to steampunk. The contents include translations of Jeff Vandermeer's "Fixing Hanover," Cherie Priest's "Tanglefoot," George Mann's "Shattered Teacup"-and my article "Of Alternate Nineteenth Centuries: The Enduring Appeal of Steampunk" (which previously ran in the July 2009 edition of the Internet Review of Science Fiction).
The issue is edited by Yoshio Kobayashi (who is also one of the country's leading translators of science fiction) under his pen name of Takashi Ogawa. As a critic he has had plenty of interest to say regarding the state of the genre and the world, and those who have not previously read it should check out K. Bird Lincoln's interview with him (and Christopher Barzak), "A View From Outside."
The issue is edited by Yoshio Kobayashi (who is also one of the country's leading translators of science fiction) under his pen name of Takashi Ogawa. As a critic he has had plenty of interest to say regarding the state of the genre and the world, and those who have not previously read it should check out K. Bird Lincoln's interview with him (and Christopher Barzak), "A View From Outside."
Monday, February 15, 2010
The Last Edition of the Internet Review Of Science Fiction
As noted here last month, the Internet Review of Science Fiction's February 2010 edition will be its last.
Here it is.
As one might expect, this last issue is especially packed, with fifteen articles instead of the usual ten. Highlights include:
* Brent Kellmer's interview with the Schlock Mercenary webcomic's Howard Trayler.
* The final editions of the publication's columns, including Nicholas Kauffman's horror column "Dead Air," Corey Rixle's "Gamenivore" (not the only gaming-themed piece here, Dotar Sojat also offering a piece on Starfrontiersman Magazine), and of course, Lois Tilton's always-worthwhile short fiction round-up-heftier than usual, with the inclusion of an introduction about the gap between the big-name, established magazines with their big-name, established authors, and the newer online venues. (Like most pieces which touch on the fortunes of authors, especially those who are up-and-coming or at least aspiring, this one quickly kicked up a lively debate in the forum, also worth checking out if you're in that position, or just generally interested in what it's like to be on the edge of the business.)
* A piece by Hugo-winning writer David Levine on "How the Future Predicts Science Fiction." (Incidentally, the science fiction-isn't-futurism theme also came up at Charlie's Diary over the weekend.)
* Bill Lengemann on "The History of Matter Transmission" in the genre.
* Micharl Andre-Drussi on the anime Paranoia Agent (just one of several pieces he's written about Japanese animation, accessible at this listing of his articles at the site).
* Anna Cates on Cormac McCarthy's The Road.
* Gary Westfahl, in his fourth "What Science Fiction Leaves Out of the Future" piece, on pets in science fiction.
* Joe Nazare on Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House, a half century later.
Once again, IROSF will be missed.
Here it is.
As one might expect, this last issue is especially packed, with fifteen articles instead of the usual ten. Highlights include:
* Brent Kellmer's interview with the Schlock Mercenary webcomic's Howard Trayler.
* The final editions of the publication's columns, including Nicholas Kauffman's horror column "Dead Air," Corey Rixle's "Gamenivore" (not the only gaming-themed piece here, Dotar Sojat also offering a piece on Starfrontiersman Magazine), and of course, Lois Tilton's always-worthwhile short fiction round-up-heftier than usual, with the inclusion of an introduction about the gap between the big-name, established magazines with their big-name, established authors, and the newer online venues. (Like most pieces which touch on the fortunes of authors, especially those who are up-and-coming or at least aspiring, this one quickly kicked up a lively debate in the forum, also worth checking out if you're in that position, or just generally interested in what it's like to be on the edge of the business.)
* A piece by Hugo-winning writer David Levine on "How the Future Predicts Science Fiction." (Incidentally, the science fiction-isn't-futurism theme also came up at Charlie's Diary over the weekend.)
* Bill Lengemann on "The History of Matter Transmission" in the genre.
* Micharl Andre-Drussi on the anime Paranoia Agent (just one of several pieces he's written about Japanese animation, accessible at this listing of his articles at the site).
* Anna Cates on Cormac McCarthy's The Road.
* Gary Westfahl, in his fourth "What Science Fiction Leaves Out of the Future" piece, on pets in science fiction.
* Joe Nazare on Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House, a half century later.
Once again, IROSF will be missed.
Friday, February 5, 2010
The Rise and Decline of the Military Techno-Thriller (Continued)
After the Peak
The end of the Cold War, and its receding into the imaginative distance, predictably took a lot of the wind out of the genre's sails. Like the spy story, the techno-thriller grew out of a context of international, "great power" conflict to which the post-Cold War era has no equivalent, without which it necessarily suffers--indeed, to an even greater degree than spy tales do.39 Nonetheless, the attempts by techno-thriller writers to keep the genre going as the world changed around them merit some attention.
In Search of Monsters to Destroy
First and foremost, techno-thriller writers (among others) strove mightily to find a substitute among the usual suspects for the status of "next" LPC (Large Peer Competitor), another power capable of confronting the U.S. with a large-scale, high-tech military challenge. A Russia under Vladimir Zhirinovsky-like nationalists and China going on the warpath were both popular choices, as in Dale Brown's Sky Masters (1991), Chains of Command (1993) and Fatal Terrain (1997), or Tom Clancy's The Bear and the Dragon (2000).
However, as Russia's economic and military power continued to wither through the 1990s, and Boris Yeltsin held onto the Russian presidency (ultimately handing it over to Vladimir Putin), the idea of hard-liners turning back the clock seemed increasingly passé. This did not eliminate the prospect of Western conflict with Russia, but the most extravagant scenarios fell by the wayside.
China was also problematic, not only because of the limits of its military capabilities, but American ambivalence about viewing the country (the booming of which is often presented as a validation of "the American way") as an enemy. Reflecting this outlook, the protagonists in China-centered thrillers were as likely to be intervening in the middle of a Chinese civil war on behalf of the Communist Party's opponents as combating Chinese aggression, as they do in Richard Herman's Dark Wing (1994) or James H. Cobb's Sea Strike (1998).
A number of writers also explored the possibility that U.S. allies would, in line with the neo-mercantilism fashionable at the time, turn into enemies. Americans battled Germany (or German-led alliances) in Larry Bond and Patrick Larkin's Cauldron (1993), Harold Coyle's The Ten Thousand (1994) and Joe Buff's Deep Sound Channel (2000); and Japan in Peters's War in 2020 (1991), Clancy's Debt of Honor (1994), Michael DiMercurio's Barrucada, Final Bearing (1996) and Coonts's Fortunes of War (1998).40 As worries about political spillover from economic competition inside the industrialized world faded amid the hosannas surrounding globalization (and the resurgence of American triumphalism) during the late 1990s, these fears faded almost completely.
In any case, such villains as they were able to create were usually good for only so much, their "enemyness" a more conditional, tenuous thing than the half-century competition with the Soviet Union.41 Certainly where Germany and Japan were concerned (and to a lesser extent, this was also the case with the more threatening versions of Russia and China writers invented), the aggressive behavior tended to be a brief, temporary aberration, their takeover by Really Bad Guys usually short-lived and running its course by the end of a limited, one-book conflict.42
As a result, writers increasingly turned their attention to smaller fry: "rogue" states like North Korea, Iran and pre-2003 Iraq; and non-state actors like terrorists and crime syndicates.43 However, rogue states appeared very limited opponents in the wake of the brief and one-sided 1991 Gulf War, and the margin of superiority American forces seemed likely to enjoy over any likely adversary afterward (the non-combat of 2005's Jarhead the ultimate commentary on the subject).44 Terrorists and drug lords were even less able to put up an interesting fight, given their tighter budgets and accustomed methods of operation.45
Accordingly, techno-thriller authors often tried to create a more level playing field, usually through the use of three devices.46 The first was to beef up the enemy's capabilities (often using leftover Soviet assets), as in Dale Brown's Shadows of Steel (1996), in which Iran acquires not just Backfire bombers, but a nuclear missile-equipped aircraft carrier.47
The second was to combine crises so as to threaten the U.S. with overstretch, as in Clancy's Executive Orders (1996), in which China and India get together with a united Iran-Iraq in a common plot.
The third was to find ever more ways to tie their heroes' hands politically-which usually meant developing the goings-on in Washington D.C. more fully.48 The interest in "Military Operations Other Than War" during that decade suggested an obvious option, placing their fictional soldiers in politically delicate peacekeeping missions where the "liberal establishment" could be an even bigger nuisance than usual.49
The Bust
Nonetheless, these devices only went so far, and the strain showed. Readers looking for high-tech military action would frequently get spies-and-commandos stuff only occasionally enlivened by a piece of new hardware, as in Larry Bond's The Enemy Within (1994) and Day of Wrath (1998); Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six, Red Rabbit (2002) and The Teeth of the Tiger (2003); and Stephen Coonts's later work, as in "Tommy Carmellini" novels like Liars & Thieves (2004)-or worse, large doses of flat, dull D.C. hijinks.50 There was also a tendency toward repetitiveness, Coonts alone devoting three of his Jake Grafton novels to the "Arab villain get nukes" theme-Final Flight (1986), The Red Horseman (1993) and Liberty (2003).
The "War on Terror" may actually have contributed to this process, by focusing public attention on forms of military conflict in which the kind of high-tech action and intrigue the techno-thriller centered on was marginal.51 Additionally, it soon became clear that there was little audience for films and television presenting events in the Middle East as entertainment, the Hollywood talent agency AEI listing "Middle East-Iraq stories" squarely in the WHAT'S NOT side of its market trends sheet at the time of this writing.52
It may also be that the costly, protracted and highly divisive conflict diminished the appeal of military adventure in general--just as it would seem to have played against the nostalgia for the Second World War so evident in the late 1990s.53
In any case, many of the most prominent techno-thriller writers stopped producing new material entirely in this period. Tom Clancy, who produced a major book every year or two for almost two decades, has not published a new novel since The Teeth of the Tiger six years ago; and even the series other writers have been publishing under his name (Op-Center, etc.) generally sputtered to a halt around 2006, the novelizations of his successful video game series excepted. Richard Herman's last book, The Last Phoenix (2003), likewise appeared that year. After 1999's Traitor, Ralph Peters (who became a prominent critic of much of the investment in high-tech, "heavy metal" weaponry) turned away entirely from contemporary military thrillers to writing the Civil War era "Abel Jones" mysteries under the name of "Owen Parry."54
The newer writers who came along in the mid- and late 1990s-like James H. Cobb and Patrick Robinson-were not in a position to have the impact of their predecessors, though many of them continued to publish and some did appear on the bestseller lists, Robinson in particular. Richard Clarke's The Scorpion's Gate (2005) attracted attention, but more because of his earlier place in the National Security Council, and his public criticism of the Bush administration in the wake of the September 11 attacks and the invasion of Iraq, than anything actually in the book.55
If anything, the change has been more complete outside of print. While video games remain a robust market for these tales (partly because of their lesser dependence on credible plots) the fading of the military techno-thriller from television and film roughly tracked the course taken by the novels, up to their even more complete disappearance. The successful JAG spin-off NCIS (2003-) features a mostly civilian cast of characters (including a very un-military Goth in Abby Sciuto) quite unlike the dress uniformed protagonists of the earlier show, and a pop-oriented soundtrack light years away from the military brass band opening theme of its predecessor.56 In line with the fashion in police drama over the last decade, it also favors forensics over military hardware. (NCIS's own spin-off, the new NCIS: Los Angeles, seems to be continuing in this direction.)
The military techno-thriller has also been relegated to the straight-to-video end of the film market, along with many of the action heroes who once starred in movies of the type.57 Large-scale battles in feature films during the last decade were much more likely to involve warriors armed with cold steel in historical and fantasy epics (a tide itself now ebbing) than engagements with modern weaponry. When the "heavy metal" hardware did come out, it was mainly to battle extraterrestrial, robotic or super-powered opponents, and the encounters are much more H.G. Wells than Tom Clancy, the soldiers in them typically being outmatched by a more sophisticated foe (like Starscream in his battle with a flight of F-22s in The Transformers).58
Legacies
The downward trend seems likely only to continue, given the genre's diminished and still-diminishing saliency. Contrary to the aggressive expectations of some futurists, two decades have passed since the fall of the Berlin Wall without a U.S. clash with another major power, or even reason to think such a clash is much more likely in the near future.
Another is that the continued automation of military operations may only further diminish the scope for that sort of fiction, a point already being reflected in film (as in 2008's remake of The Day The Earth Stood Still, where a pair of MQ-9 Reaper drones make a run on GORT).
Still, it would be a mistake to think the techno-thriller did not make a mark on fiction in general and science fiction in particular--just as the Victorian-era invasion story and Edisonade left their marks long after they disappeared or became unrecognizable.
One point of connection is the transitioning of many techno-thriller writers to fiction with a more conspicuous speculative element, like Payne Harrison in his Roswell-themed Forbidden Summit (1997) and Stephen Coonts in his similarly-themed Saucer (2002, sequel 2004), or Harold Coyle in Dead Hand (2002), in which an asteroid strike is central to the plot.
If anything, the relative latecomers seemed even more prone to doing so, like James H. Cobb in Cibola (2004); R.J. Pineiro in Havoc (2005) and Spyware (2007); and Richard Clarke in Breakpoint (2007). Dan Brown, whose early novels included 1998's Digital Fortress and 2001's Deception Point, may also be reasonably included in this group of techno-thriller writers who went on to other things.
Additionally, some writers went in the opposite direction, established science fiction writers delving into the techno-thriller genre. Dean Ing, whose long list of credits include the completion of a number of Mack Reynolds' manuscripts, as well as collaborations with Jerry Pournelle and S.M. Stirling, penned novels like The Ransom of Black Stealth One (1989). John Shirley's Eclipse trilogy (1985, 1987, 1989) about rebels fighting a takeover of Western Europe by neo-fascists, has a reasonable claim to being a techno-thriller in its own right-and is notable in being written from the point of view of the political left, a genre rarity. More recently, Bruce Sterling produced what may be the closest thing to a parody of the '80s-style techno-thriller to date, in 2004's Zenith Angle.59 (Indeed, it was in cyberpunk more than anywhere else that writers showed some proclivity to stand the techno-thriller on its head the way H.G. Wells did with the invasion stories of his own time.)
More broadly, the style of the military techno-thriller, in particular its close detailing of the functioning of complex military equipment on the battlefield and the use of multiple viewpoints to extend the depiction of the action, has impacted other science fiction as well. Harry Turtledove's Worldwar and "Timeline-191" cycles, for instance, frequently read like period versions of the 1980s-style future war story. Similarly, David Weber's highly successful Honor Harrington series gives the impression of a Tom Clancy novel adapted for a context of interstellar warfare.
John Birmingham's recent novels too reflect such an influence, as with his "Axis of Time" trilogy (2004's Weapons of Choice, 2005's Designated Targets and 2007's Final Impact), in which an American-allied naval task force travels back in time from 2021 to World War II; or his more recent Without Warning (2009), in which the U.S. simply vanishes in March 2003.
Another Australian writer, Matthew Reilly, similarly combines high-tech military action with more extravagant science fiction elements in novels like Temple (1999) and the Jack West series (2005, 2007 and 2009). Reilly has perhaps drawn more attention for his prose style than any other aspect of his work, but his combination of three-way military battles with alien artifacts, cryptozoology, exotic technologies ancient and futuristic, and archaeological mysteries that make Dan Brown's speculations look positively tame, helped to make him one of the most noteworthy action writers of the last decade. As much as anything else, the work of authors like Reilly suggests our imaginary battles are only becoming more so.
1 There were some exceptions, however, like Stephen Coonts's Vietnam-era The Flight of the Intruder (1986), and Ralph Peters The War in 2020 (1991), which went three decades into the future.
2 Of course, when the MacGuffin was a piece of American technology, the job of the heroes was reversed: to stop the Soviets from capturing or destroying it.
3 Barrett Tillman also merits notice, though prior to his success as a techno-thriller writer he was (and remains) a popular military and aviation historian.
4 "Grisham Ranks as Top-Selling Author of the Decade," CNN.com, Dec. 31, 1999. Accessed at http://archives.cnn.com/1999/books/news/12/31/1990.sellers/index.html.
5 Besides the books actually written by Clancy, there were four series of novels (Op-Center, Net Force, Net Force Explorers and Power Plays), and two series of nonfiction books (one of guided tours of U.S. military units, the other biographies of prominent American military figures), produced by other writers under his name.
6 By contrast, the earlier installments in the series avoided such elements. A noteworthy example is the early script for The Spy Who Loved Me, in which real-lifeworld terrorists used nuclear missiles to threaten the world's oil fields, rejected as "too political."
7 Clancy's empire made a mark here as well in miniseries based on the Op-Center (1995) and Net Force (1999) books.
8 There is, of course, another alternative, the bleaker, harder, more critical view most often identified with novels by John le Carré like The Spy Who Came In From The Cold (1963)--a subtler reflection of this more fragmented reality.
9 Political thrillers like Eugene Burdick and Harvey Wheeler's Fail-Safe (1962) and Anthony Gray's The Penetrators (1965) likewise anticipated the feel of the techno-thriller in their detailed descriptions of weapons and communications systems, organizations, and their broad depictions of large-scale, high-technology military crises.
10 Raise the Titanic! is particularly significant in this regard, its plot centering on the pursuit of "byzanium" fuel for an American missile defense scheme, and saw Soviet attempts to interfere with the project-only the first of several Cussler novels to contain a significant Cold War element. Later Cussler novels like Dragon (1990) and Sahara (1992) move even further in the "techno-thriller" direction in their plots and depictions of military action.
11 The diffusion may also be partly due to the novels being military thrillers as well as spy thrillers, war stories historically being more prone to the use of such large casts of characters; and publishers' demand for larger books, the older style of spy novel typically resulting in a relatively slim narrative. (Ian Fleming's Bond books, typically 60-70,000 words in length, are so short as to be nearly unpublishable today.)
12 In The Hunt for Red October, the scenes containing Ryan come to 148 pages out of 468 in the paperback edition (New York: Berkeley, 1985). The proportion of the text devoted to his thoughts and actions trends downward from there, to a mere 207 of Debt of Honor's 990 pages (New York: Berkeley, 1995). Obviously, the film versions presented a more conventional story structure.
13 Nonetheless, Clancy included his fair share of implausible coincidences getting Ryan into a shoot-out with a GRU agent aboard the titular submarine in The Hunt For Red October, IRA terrorists in Patriot Games (1987) and the rescue mission (during which he manned a mini-gun) in Clear and Present Danger (1989). The supporting characters of John Clark and Domingo Chavez were also a closer fit with the traditional image of the globe-trotting spy.
14 Karen Hinckley and Barbara Hinckley, American Bestsellers: A Reader's Guide to Popular Fiction (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1989), p. 212.
15 To give one example, Erskine Childers's 1903 The Riddle of the Sands, in which a British Foreign Office employee on holiday happens upon German preparations to invade Britain, is considered an important work in both those genres: both part of the stream of invasion stories that started in the 1870s, and an early example of the new spy novel that would strongly influence that genre's development as well.
16 The best-known scholar of the invasion story is I.F. Clarke, who offers a history of it in his book Voices Prophesying War: Future Wars 1763-1984, later updated as Voices Prophesying War: Future Wars 1763-3794. He also wrote two articles on the subject for the journal Science Fiction Studies which are available online, "Before and After The Battle of Dorking," Science Fiction Studies 24.1 (Mar. 1997). Accessed at http://www.depauw.edu/sfs/backissues/71/clarke71art.htm; and "Future War Fiction: The First Main Phase, 1871-1900," Science Fiction Studies 24.3 (Nov. 1997). Accessed at http://www.depauw.edu/sfs/clarkeess.htm. Also see Nader Elhefnawy, "Revisiting the Victorian Techno-thriller," Strange Horizons, Feb. 23, 2009.
17 A notable, post-World War I example is Hector Charles Bywater's 1925 The Great Pacific War: A History of the American-Japanese Campaign of 1931-1933.
18 Interestingly, this was despite Heinlein's recognition of the devastating power of nuclear weaponry quite early on, evident in essays like "The Last Days of the United States." This can be found in Heinlein, Expanded Universe (New York: Ace, 1980), pp. 145-162.
19 See Martha A. Barrter, "The Hidden Agenda." In George Slusser and Eric S. Rabkin, eds. Fights of Fancy (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1993), pp. 155-169. Indeed, as H. Bruce Franklin argues, "Almost without exception, movies that dealt openly with atomic weapons from 1952 through 1958 were Cold War propaganda tracts," like the Jimmy Stewart movie Strategic Air Command (1955). H. Bruce Franklin, War Stars: The Superweapon and the American Imagination, Revised and Expanded Edition (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2008), p. 182.
20 Clarke, p. 201. That went even for the limited "hot" conflicts the U.S. planned for and actually fought at this time (as in Korea and Southeast Asia). The absence is not even mentioned in Arne Axelsson's survey of early Cold War literature, Restrained Response: American Novels of the Cold War and Korea, 1945-1962 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1990). It might be pointed out, however, that Gray's 1965 novel The Penetrators was an argument for the necessity of a conventional military option (specifically, the continued value of bomber aircraft in the missile age).
21 Not all of the writers who took this position were defense "hawks." Arthur C. Clarke depicted just such a version of a Third World War in July 20, 2019: Life in the 21st Century (New York: Macmillan, 1986). The idea of a World War III limited enough to leave high-tech civilization intact also frequently appeared in 1980s cyberpunk, as with William Gibson's Sprawl trilogy (1984, 1986, 1988), John Shirley's Eclipse trilogy (1985, 1987, 1989) and Victor Milan's Cybernetic Samurai (1986).
22 Much of the literature that followed explicitly reflected the interest in these possibilities. Laser-based missile defenses and space battles became popular subjects, as in Craig Thomas's later Mitchell Gant adventure, Winter Hawk (1987); Dale Brown's The Flight of the Old Dog (1987) and Silver Tower (1988); Tom Clancy's The Cardinal of the Kremlin (1988); and Payne Harrison's Storming Intrepid (1989). Then-novel stealth aircraft were also popular as a focus, as in the novels by Brown and Harrison, Coonts's Minotaur (1989) and Timothy Rizzi's Nightstalker (1992).
23 This may have been due to Britain's decline as a military power after World War II, making it difficult for writers to put it at the center of this sort of story. This reality may also account for the outpouring of fiction about the Special Air Service at this time which-by focusing on an area where smaller, less affluent powers can be competitive-filled that gap in British popular fiction. (Tellingly, when Frederick Forsythe retold the story of Desert Storm as a Clancy-style techno-thriller in 1994's The Fist of God, it centered on the adventure of an SAS officer.) John Newsinger analyzes the phenomenon at length in Dangerous Men: The SAS and Popular Culture (London: Pluto Press, 1997).
24 Besides Clancy's Red Storm, Brown's Silver Tower and Harrison's Thunder of Erebus (1991), there were Harold Coyle's Team Yankee (1987) (which retold Hackett's 1978 tale from the viewpoint of an American tank crew) and Sword Point (1989); Ralph Peters's Red Army (1989); and Barrett Tillman's The Sixth Battle (1992).
25 In Clancy's Red Storm, the Soviet escalation of the conflict to the tactical nuclear level is narrowly averted by a coup in Moscow. Such plots were sometimes criticized as wishful thinking, historian Martin Van Creveld referring to Red Storm Rising in his annotated bibliography as the story of how World War III "will not happen." See Martin Van Creveld, The Transformation of War (New York: The Free Press, 1991).
26 Nader Elhefnawy, "Of Alternate Nineteenth Centuries," The Internet Review of Science Fiction (Jul. 2009). Accessed at http://www.irosf.com/q/zine/article/10562.
27 Robert Lekachman, "Virtuous Men and Perfect Weapons," New York Times, Jul. 27, 1986. Accessed at http://www.nytimes.com/1986/07/27/books/virtuous-men-and-perfect-weapons.html.
28 Clancy in particular would be celebrated and denigrated as the "minstrel of the military-industrial complex." See Walter Shapiro, "Of Arms and the Man," Time, Aug. 21, 1989. Accessed at http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,958400-1,00.html. Andrew Bacevich offers a more critical examination in The New American Militarism: How Americans Are Seduced By War (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), pp. 116-117.
29 John Clute, "Yore is Us," The Infinite Matrix, Nov. 29, 2001. Accessed at http://www.infinitematrix.net/columns/clute/clute1.html. Roughly analogous, and much more famous, are some of Jules Verne's works, particularly Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (1870), in which Captain Nemo uses his submarine Nautilus to exact revenge on the British Empire.
30 In the genre-defining British tale The Battle of Dorking, the German conquest is made feasible by the country's seizure of strategic North European coastlines and its clever use of deception against an overstretched and underprepared British Empire, new technologies playing only a supporting role (with the most notable the Germans' use of vaguely described "engines" to sink a part of the Royal Navy). By contrast, Stanley Waterloo's 1898 Armageddon-typical of the type-the airship Wild Goose enables the U.S. and its allies win a world war.
31 Franklin, pp. 131-134. In addition to the pre-World War I stories, this was also often the case in the early Cold War period when the U.S. had a monopoly on nuclear weaponry, though rare in the 1980s techno-thriller, where conflict (and its consequences) tended to be more constrained. Franklin, p. 52.
32 Jeff Nevins, "Introduction: The 19th Century Roots of Steampunk." In Ann & Jeff Vandermeer, Steampunk (San Fransisco, CA: Tachyon Publications, 2008), p. 10.
33 Tom Clancy in particular was given to never passing up an opportunity to insult the Soviets, in Red October even going so far as to denigrate the attractiveness of the models in the pornography Soviet sailors had in their lockers. Clancy, Red October, p. 420.
34 Dale Brown, The Flight of the Old Dog (New York: Donald I. Fine, 1987), p. 26. As anyone who has so much as glanced at a serious study of the Soviet economy realizes, this is a grossly oversimplistic picture, but the view had no shortage of adherents.
35 One such exception is Ralph Peters's 1989 Red Army, in which a divided Western alliance accedes to the Soviet conquest of West Germany rather than escalate the fight.
36 Anti-war space stories like Joe Haldeman's 1974 The Forever War; and low-tech space war stories, like Gordon R. Dickson's Dorsai novels (starting with 1959's Dorsai!), which posit technological advances canceling each other out so that warfare still came down to close combat between small groups of men with small arms; would seem less relevant to this particular tradition.
37 George and Meredith Friedman, The Future of War: Power, Technology and American World Dominance in the Twenty-First Century (New York: Random House, 1996), pp. 378-379.
38 Franklin discusses this extensively in War Stars, pp. 200-205.
39 A quick glance at the bestseller lists of the 2000s (and even the 1990s) shows no spy story writer enjoying the prominence of Robert Ludlum, Frederick Forsythe, Ken Follett and John le Carré in the 1970s and 1980s, Clancy excepted--as well as a lower profile for the genre in general. (One can access a large archive of the New York Times's bestseller lists dating back to the 1940s at the web site of Hawes Publications, http://www.hawes.com/.)
40 These concerns were not totally confined to fiction. George Friedman and Meredith LeBard published a nonfiction book making the case for the likelihood of such a conflict, The Coming War With Japan (New York: St. Martin's), 1991. Friedman recently attempted to rehabilitate this prediction in The Next 100 Years: A Forecast for the 21st Century (New York: Doubleday, 2009).
41 For a discussion of "enemyness" see Tom Engelhardt, The End of Victory Culture: Cold War America and the Disillusioning of a Generation, revised edition (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2007). This was already a problem even before the Cold War's end, as demonstrated by the climactic battle in Top Gun, where the Tomcat pilots engage anonymous black jets in a skirmish with a background underwritten to the point of absurdity.
42 Joe Buff is unique in having extended his saga of a Third World War fought between an Anglo-American alliance and a continentally dominant Germany across a half dozen books.
43 Saddam Hussein and his sons Uday and Qusay were particularly popular villains before his regime's overthrow, as in R.J. Pineiro's Ultimatum (1994) and Chris Stewart's Kill Box (1998).
44 This was also because many of these states had earlier been Soviet client states, now making do without their old friend or sponsor; and because the Cold War context that made local actions appear more globally significant had vanished.
45 It is worth noting that the lack of really big enemies for the U.S. military to face had become something of a joke, as in Michael Moore's political satire Canadian Bacon (1994).
46 Contemporary readers may be surprised to know that Chesney used these various techniques in The Battle of Dorking to make the danger of a German invasion of Britain appear more plausible. See the discussion in Elhefnawy, "Revisiting the Victorian Techno-thriller."
47 On a more modest scale, this was even done with criminal syndicates, as in Brown's Hammerheads (1990), where the villainous drug smuggler amasses a small air force complete with fighter jets (an idea also seen in film, notably 1990's Fire Birds and 1992's Aces: Iron Eagle III).
48 Richard Herman was particularly prone to invent situations in which small U.S. forces (often making do with less than the best equipment) were stuck battling a foe that ordinarily would be no match for American military power. In The Warbirds, only an American wing of F-4 Phantoms stands between a Soviet-backed Iran and the oil fields of the Persian Gulf. In Iron Gate (1995), U.S. forces are compelled to try and keep the peace in South Africa with just a handful of A-10s.
49 Nonetheless, the level of interest in such situations was low because the conflicts did not affect "U.S. national interest" as commonly construed, or fit into familiar narratives of heroes, villains and victims offering readers "instant drama." (Indeed, many potential situations, like the war in the Congo, were virtually ignored by the American media.) Still, a few books were written about relatively unfamiliar situations. Jim DeFelice's War Breaker concerned large-scale fighting between India and Pakistan, while James H. Cobb's Sea Fighter (2000) is set in West Africa.
50 Space warfare in particular became rare, given its place at the high end of the technological spectrum. Nonetheless, a number of novels treating the theme did appear, including Hagberg's By Dawn's Early Light (2003) and Dale Brown's Strike Force (2007) and Shadow Command (2008). Still, it may be that the more limited scale and context of most of these conflicts (and perhaps the passing of the Cold War's memory) made writers more likely to depict tactical nuclear war-fighting, as in the novels of Joe Buff and Dale Brown (particularly the latter's 2004 Plan of Attack).
51 It might also be noted that with Saddam Hussein overthrown in Iraq, a friendly regime installed in Afghanistan, Libya downgraded considerably as an adversary and China, Russia and Pakistan combating a common enemy along with the U.S.; and the prevailing piety being that the "War on Terror" trumped all other concerns in international politics; the list of potential enemies seemed shorter still to those given to thinking in these terms.
52 The market trends sheet can be found at the agency's web site, http://www.aeionline.com/. Of course, the situation was similar during the Vietnam War, which saw the release of only one Hollywood film about the subject during its course--the controversial The Green Berets (1968). Nonetheless, there were exceptions. The controversial television series 24 did well, and JAG did see a ratings spike in its last years, while the David Mamet-created The Unit (2006-), which began as a mid-season replacement, was also a hit.
53 Indeed, the absence of really successful films of this type may be one reason why the film version of Frank Miller's 300 (2007) was so quickly accepted as a metaphor for the conflict.
54 For the latter half of the 1990s, Harold Coyle also stopped writing techno-thrillers, instead producing a trio of historical novels, comprised of a two book Civil War saga-Look Away (1995) and Until the End (1996)-and the French and Indian War story, Savage Wilderness (1997).
55 Indeed, weak as the spy genre presently is, Vince Flynn, Brad Thor and Ted Bell have made more of a splash than these authors, while Cobb's most recent writing has been for the Robert Ludlum franchise's "Covert One" imprint.
56 In fact, the show's use of music has garnered it considerable attention. See Phil Gallo, "CBS Finds New Way to Use Tunes," Variety, Feb. 2, 2009. Accessed at http://www.variety.com/article/VR1117999433.html?categoryid=2857&cs=1.
57 Examples of these movies include Wesley Snipes's The Marksman (2005), Steven Seagal's Submerged (2005) and Flight of Fury (2007) and Jean-Claude Van Damme's Second in Command (2006). This was even the case with the sequels to the relatively successful Behind Enemy Lines, appearing in direct-to-video format in 2006 and 2009 (without Owen Wilson).
58 Already in 1996 Independence Day was a bigger hit than any movie in which American servicemen tackled a real-world opponent, and as of 2009, far and away the most commercially successful film about the "War on Terror" is Iron Man (2008), which simply scratched the Communists from the original Stan Lee plot and replaced them with Islamic fundamentalists. See Nader Elhefnawy, "Science Fiction and the Post-Cold War," Internet Review of Science Fiction, Jan. 2009. Accessed at http://www.irosf.com/q/zine/article/10498.
59 In that novel, set against the backdrop of the War on Terror's earliest days, an American businessman offers a laser weapon for sale on the international market, which he uses to disrupt the workings of an American reconnaissance satellite in a demonstration of its power. His prospective buyers, representatives of the Chinese and Indian governments, however, prove spectacularly uninterested in the product.
Back.
The end of the Cold War, and its receding into the imaginative distance, predictably took a lot of the wind out of the genre's sails. Like the spy story, the techno-thriller grew out of a context of international, "great power" conflict to which the post-Cold War era has no equivalent, without which it necessarily suffers--indeed, to an even greater degree than spy tales do.39 Nonetheless, the attempts by techno-thriller writers to keep the genre going as the world changed around them merit some attention.
In Search of Monsters to Destroy
First and foremost, techno-thriller writers (among others) strove mightily to find a substitute among the usual suspects for the status of "next" LPC (Large Peer Competitor), another power capable of confronting the U.S. with a large-scale, high-tech military challenge. A Russia under Vladimir Zhirinovsky-like nationalists and China going on the warpath were both popular choices, as in Dale Brown's Sky Masters (1991), Chains of Command (1993) and Fatal Terrain (1997), or Tom Clancy's The Bear and the Dragon (2000).
However, as Russia's economic and military power continued to wither through the 1990s, and Boris Yeltsin held onto the Russian presidency (ultimately handing it over to Vladimir Putin), the idea of hard-liners turning back the clock seemed increasingly passé. This did not eliminate the prospect of Western conflict with Russia, but the most extravagant scenarios fell by the wayside.
China was also problematic, not only because of the limits of its military capabilities, but American ambivalence about viewing the country (the booming of which is often presented as a validation of "the American way") as an enemy. Reflecting this outlook, the protagonists in China-centered thrillers were as likely to be intervening in the middle of a Chinese civil war on behalf of the Communist Party's opponents as combating Chinese aggression, as they do in Richard Herman's Dark Wing (1994) or James H. Cobb's Sea Strike (1998).
A number of writers also explored the possibility that U.S. allies would, in line with the neo-mercantilism fashionable at the time, turn into enemies. Americans battled Germany (or German-led alliances) in Larry Bond and Patrick Larkin's Cauldron (1993), Harold Coyle's The Ten Thousand (1994) and Joe Buff's Deep Sound Channel (2000); and Japan in Peters's War in 2020 (1991), Clancy's Debt of Honor (1994), Michael DiMercurio's Barrucada, Final Bearing (1996) and Coonts's Fortunes of War (1998).40 As worries about political spillover from economic competition inside the industrialized world faded amid the hosannas surrounding globalization (and the resurgence of American triumphalism) during the late 1990s, these fears faded almost completely.
In any case, such villains as they were able to create were usually good for only so much, their "enemyness" a more conditional, tenuous thing than the half-century competition with the Soviet Union.41 Certainly where Germany and Japan were concerned (and to a lesser extent, this was also the case with the more threatening versions of Russia and China writers invented), the aggressive behavior tended to be a brief, temporary aberration, their takeover by Really Bad Guys usually short-lived and running its course by the end of a limited, one-book conflict.42
As a result, writers increasingly turned their attention to smaller fry: "rogue" states like North Korea, Iran and pre-2003 Iraq; and non-state actors like terrorists and crime syndicates.43 However, rogue states appeared very limited opponents in the wake of the brief and one-sided 1991 Gulf War, and the margin of superiority American forces seemed likely to enjoy over any likely adversary afterward (the non-combat of 2005's Jarhead the ultimate commentary on the subject).44 Terrorists and drug lords were even less able to put up an interesting fight, given their tighter budgets and accustomed methods of operation.45
Accordingly, techno-thriller authors often tried to create a more level playing field, usually through the use of three devices.46 The first was to beef up the enemy's capabilities (often using leftover Soviet assets), as in Dale Brown's Shadows of Steel (1996), in which Iran acquires not just Backfire bombers, but a nuclear missile-equipped aircraft carrier.47
The second was to combine crises so as to threaten the U.S. with overstretch, as in Clancy's Executive Orders (1996), in which China and India get together with a united Iran-Iraq in a common plot.
The third was to find ever more ways to tie their heroes' hands politically-which usually meant developing the goings-on in Washington D.C. more fully.48 The interest in "Military Operations Other Than War" during that decade suggested an obvious option, placing their fictional soldiers in politically delicate peacekeeping missions where the "liberal establishment" could be an even bigger nuisance than usual.49
The Bust
Nonetheless, these devices only went so far, and the strain showed. Readers looking for high-tech military action would frequently get spies-and-commandos stuff only occasionally enlivened by a piece of new hardware, as in Larry Bond's The Enemy Within (1994) and Day of Wrath (1998); Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six, Red Rabbit (2002) and The Teeth of the Tiger (2003); and Stephen Coonts's later work, as in "Tommy Carmellini" novels like Liars & Thieves (2004)-or worse, large doses of flat, dull D.C. hijinks.50 There was also a tendency toward repetitiveness, Coonts alone devoting three of his Jake Grafton novels to the "Arab villain get nukes" theme-Final Flight (1986), The Red Horseman (1993) and Liberty (2003).
The "War on Terror" may actually have contributed to this process, by focusing public attention on forms of military conflict in which the kind of high-tech action and intrigue the techno-thriller centered on was marginal.51 Additionally, it soon became clear that there was little audience for films and television presenting events in the Middle East as entertainment, the Hollywood talent agency AEI listing "Middle East-Iraq stories" squarely in the WHAT'S NOT side of its market trends sheet at the time of this writing.52
It may also be that the costly, protracted and highly divisive conflict diminished the appeal of military adventure in general--just as it would seem to have played against the nostalgia for the Second World War so evident in the late 1990s.53
In any case, many of the most prominent techno-thriller writers stopped producing new material entirely in this period. Tom Clancy, who produced a major book every year or two for almost two decades, has not published a new novel since The Teeth of the Tiger six years ago; and even the series other writers have been publishing under his name (Op-Center, etc.) generally sputtered to a halt around 2006, the novelizations of his successful video game series excepted. Richard Herman's last book, The Last Phoenix (2003), likewise appeared that year. After 1999's Traitor, Ralph Peters (who became a prominent critic of much of the investment in high-tech, "heavy metal" weaponry) turned away entirely from contemporary military thrillers to writing the Civil War era "Abel Jones" mysteries under the name of "Owen Parry."54
The newer writers who came along in the mid- and late 1990s-like James H. Cobb and Patrick Robinson-were not in a position to have the impact of their predecessors, though many of them continued to publish and some did appear on the bestseller lists, Robinson in particular. Richard Clarke's The Scorpion's Gate (2005) attracted attention, but more because of his earlier place in the National Security Council, and his public criticism of the Bush administration in the wake of the September 11 attacks and the invasion of Iraq, than anything actually in the book.55
If anything, the change has been more complete outside of print. While video games remain a robust market for these tales (partly because of their lesser dependence on credible plots) the fading of the military techno-thriller from television and film roughly tracked the course taken by the novels, up to their even more complete disappearance. The successful JAG spin-off NCIS (2003-) features a mostly civilian cast of characters (including a very un-military Goth in Abby Sciuto) quite unlike the dress uniformed protagonists of the earlier show, and a pop-oriented soundtrack light years away from the military brass band opening theme of its predecessor.56 In line with the fashion in police drama over the last decade, it also favors forensics over military hardware. (NCIS's own spin-off, the new NCIS: Los Angeles, seems to be continuing in this direction.)
The military techno-thriller has also been relegated to the straight-to-video end of the film market, along with many of the action heroes who once starred in movies of the type.57 Large-scale battles in feature films during the last decade were much more likely to involve warriors armed with cold steel in historical and fantasy epics (a tide itself now ebbing) than engagements with modern weaponry. When the "heavy metal" hardware did come out, it was mainly to battle extraterrestrial, robotic or super-powered opponents, and the encounters are much more H.G. Wells than Tom Clancy, the soldiers in them typically being outmatched by a more sophisticated foe (like Starscream in his battle with a flight of F-22s in The Transformers).58
Legacies
The downward trend seems likely only to continue, given the genre's diminished and still-diminishing saliency. Contrary to the aggressive expectations of some futurists, two decades have passed since the fall of the Berlin Wall without a U.S. clash with another major power, or even reason to think such a clash is much more likely in the near future.
Another is that the continued automation of military operations may only further diminish the scope for that sort of fiction, a point already being reflected in film (as in 2008's remake of The Day The Earth Stood Still, where a pair of MQ-9 Reaper drones make a run on GORT).
Still, it would be a mistake to think the techno-thriller did not make a mark on fiction in general and science fiction in particular--just as the Victorian-era invasion story and Edisonade left their marks long after they disappeared or became unrecognizable.
One point of connection is the transitioning of many techno-thriller writers to fiction with a more conspicuous speculative element, like Payne Harrison in his Roswell-themed Forbidden Summit (1997) and Stephen Coonts in his similarly-themed Saucer (2002, sequel 2004), or Harold Coyle in Dead Hand (2002), in which an asteroid strike is central to the plot.
If anything, the relative latecomers seemed even more prone to doing so, like James H. Cobb in Cibola (2004); R.J. Pineiro in Havoc (2005) and Spyware (2007); and Richard Clarke in Breakpoint (2007). Dan Brown, whose early novels included 1998's Digital Fortress and 2001's Deception Point, may also be reasonably included in this group of techno-thriller writers who went on to other things.
Additionally, some writers went in the opposite direction, established science fiction writers delving into the techno-thriller genre. Dean Ing, whose long list of credits include the completion of a number of Mack Reynolds' manuscripts, as well as collaborations with Jerry Pournelle and S.M. Stirling, penned novels like The Ransom of Black Stealth One (1989). John Shirley's Eclipse trilogy (1985, 1987, 1989) about rebels fighting a takeover of Western Europe by neo-fascists, has a reasonable claim to being a techno-thriller in its own right-and is notable in being written from the point of view of the political left, a genre rarity. More recently, Bruce Sterling produced what may be the closest thing to a parody of the '80s-style techno-thriller to date, in 2004's Zenith Angle.59 (Indeed, it was in cyberpunk more than anywhere else that writers showed some proclivity to stand the techno-thriller on its head the way H.G. Wells did with the invasion stories of his own time.)
More broadly, the style of the military techno-thriller, in particular its close detailing of the functioning of complex military equipment on the battlefield and the use of multiple viewpoints to extend the depiction of the action, has impacted other science fiction as well. Harry Turtledove's Worldwar and "Timeline-191" cycles, for instance, frequently read like period versions of the 1980s-style future war story. Similarly, David Weber's highly successful Honor Harrington series gives the impression of a Tom Clancy novel adapted for a context of interstellar warfare.
John Birmingham's recent novels too reflect such an influence, as with his "Axis of Time" trilogy (2004's Weapons of Choice, 2005's Designated Targets and 2007's Final Impact), in which an American-allied naval task force travels back in time from 2021 to World War II; or his more recent Without Warning (2009), in which the U.S. simply vanishes in March 2003.
Another Australian writer, Matthew Reilly, similarly combines high-tech military action with more extravagant science fiction elements in novels like Temple (1999) and the Jack West series (2005, 2007 and 2009). Reilly has perhaps drawn more attention for his prose style than any other aspect of his work, but his combination of three-way military battles with alien artifacts, cryptozoology, exotic technologies ancient and futuristic, and archaeological mysteries that make Dan Brown's speculations look positively tame, helped to make him one of the most noteworthy action writers of the last decade. As much as anything else, the work of authors like Reilly suggests our imaginary battles are only becoming more so.
1 There were some exceptions, however, like Stephen Coonts's Vietnam-era The Flight of the Intruder (1986), and Ralph Peters The War in 2020 (1991), which went three decades into the future.
2 Of course, when the MacGuffin was a piece of American technology, the job of the heroes was reversed: to stop the Soviets from capturing or destroying it.
3 Barrett Tillman also merits notice, though prior to his success as a techno-thriller writer he was (and remains) a popular military and aviation historian.
4 "Grisham Ranks as Top-Selling Author of the Decade," CNN.com, Dec. 31, 1999. Accessed at http://archives.cnn.com/1999/books/news/12/31/1990.sellers/index.html.
5 Besides the books actually written by Clancy, there were four series of novels (Op-Center, Net Force, Net Force Explorers and Power Plays), and two series of nonfiction books (one of guided tours of U.S. military units, the other biographies of prominent American military figures), produced by other writers under his name.
6 By contrast, the earlier installments in the series avoided such elements. A noteworthy example is the early script for The Spy Who Loved Me, in which real-lifeworld terrorists used nuclear missiles to threaten the world's oil fields, rejected as "too political."
7 Clancy's empire made a mark here as well in miniseries based on the Op-Center (1995) and Net Force (1999) books.
8 There is, of course, another alternative, the bleaker, harder, more critical view most often identified with novels by John le Carré like The Spy Who Came In From The Cold (1963)--a subtler reflection of this more fragmented reality.
9 Political thrillers like Eugene Burdick and Harvey Wheeler's Fail-Safe (1962) and Anthony Gray's The Penetrators (1965) likewise anticipated the feel of the techno-thriller in their detailed descriptions of weapons and communications systems, organizations, and their broad depictions of large-scale, high-technology military crises.
10 Raise the Titanic! is particularly significant in this regard, its plot centering on the pursuit of "byzanium" fuel for an American missile defense scheme, and saw Soviet attempts to interfere with the project-only the first of several Cussler novels to contain a significant Cold War element. Later Cussler novels like Dragon (1990) and Sahara (1992) move even further in the "techno-thriller" direction in their plots and depictions of military action.
11 The diffusion may also be partly due to the novels being military thrillers as well as spy thrillers, war stories historically being more prone to the use of such large casts of characters; and publishers' demand for larger books, the older style of spy novel typically resulting in a relatively slim narrative. (Ian Fleming's Bond books, typically 60-70,000 words in length, are so short as to be nearly unpublishable today.)
12 In The Hunt for Red October, the scenes containing Ryan come to 148 pages out of 468 in the paperback edition (New York: Berkeley, 1985). The proportion of the text devoted to his thoughts and actions trends downward from there, to a mere 207 of Debt of Honor's 990 pages (New York: Berkeley, 1995). Obviously, the film versions presented a more conventional story structure.
13 Nonetheless, Clancy included his fair share of implausible coincidences getting Ryan into a shoot-out with a GRU agent aboard the titular submarine in The Hunt For Red October, IRA terrorists in Patriot Games (1987) and the rescue mission (during which he manned a mini-gun) in Clear and Present Danger (1989). The supporting characters of John Clark and Domingo Chavez were also a closer fit with the traditional image of the globe-trotting spy.
14 Karen Hinckley and Barbara Hinckley, American Bestsellers: A Reader's Guide to Popular Fiction (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1989), p. 212.
15 To give one example, Erskine Childers's 1903 The Riddle of the Sands, in which a British Foreign Office employee on holiday happens upon German preparations to invade Britain, is considered an important work in both those genres: both part of the stream of invasion stories that started in the 1870s, and an early example of the new spy novel that would strongly influence that genre's development as well.
16 The best-known scholar of the invasion story is I.F. Clarke, who offers a history of it in his book Voices Prophesying War: Future Wars 1763-1984, later updated as Voices Prophesying War: Future Wars 1763-3794. He also wrote two articles on the subject for the journal Science Fiction Studies which are available online, "Before and After The Battle of Dorking," Science Fiction Studies 24.1 (Mar. 1997). Accessed at http://www.depauw.edu/sfs/backissues/71/clarke71art.htm; and "Future War Fiction: The First Main Phase, 1871-1900," Science Fiction Studies 24.3 (Nov. 1997). Accessed at http://www.depauw.edu/sfs/clarkeess.htm. Also see Nader Elhefnawy, "Revisiting the Victorian Techno-thriller," Strange Horizons, Feb. 23, 2009.
17 A notable, post-World War I example is Hector Charles Bywater's 1925 The Great Pacific War: A History of the American-Japanese Campaign of 1931-1933.
18 Interestingly, this was despite Heinlein's recognition of the devastating power of nuclear weaponry quite early on, evident in essays like "The Last Days of the United States." This can be found in Heinlein, Expanded Universe (New York: Ace, 1980), pp. 145-162.
19 See Martha A. Barrter, "The Hidden Agenda." In George Slusser and Eric S. Rabkin, eds. Fights of Fancy (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1993), pp. 155-169. Indeed, as H. Bruce Franklin argues, "Almost without exception, movies that dealt openly with atomic weapons from 1952 through 1958 were Cold War propaganda tracts," like the Jimmy Stewart movie Strategic Air Command (1955). H. Bruce Franklin, War Stars: The Superweapon and the American Imagination, Revised and Expanded Edition (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2008), p. 182.
20 Clarke, p. 201. That went even for the limited "hot" conflicts the U.S. planned for and actually fought at this time (as in Korea and Southeast Asia). The absence is not even mentioned in Arne Axelsson's survey of early Cold War literature, Restrained Response: American Novels of the Cold War and Korea, 1945-1962 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1990). It might be pointed out, however, that Gray's 1965 novel The Penetrators was an argument for the necessity of a conventional military option (specifically, the continued value of bomber aircraft in the missile age).
21 Not all of the writers who took this position were defense "hawks." Arthur C. Clarke depicted just such a version of a Third World War in July 20, 2019: Life in the 21st Century (New York: Macmillan, 1986). The idea of a World War III limited enough to leave high-tech civilization intact also frequently appeared in 1980s cyberpunk, as with William Gibson's Sprawl trilogy (1984, 1986, 1988), John Shirley's Eclipse trilogy (1985, 1987, 1989) and Victor Milan's Cybernetic Samurai (1986).
22 Much of the literature that followed explicitly reflected the interest in these possibilities. Laser-based missile defenses and space battles became popular subjects, as in Craig Thomas's later Mitchell Gant adventure, Winter Hawk (1987); Dale Brown's The Flight of the Old Dog (1987) and Silver Tower (1988); Tom Clancy's The Cardinal of the Kremlin (1988); and Payne Harrison's Storming Intrepid (1989). Then-novel stealth aircraft were also popular as a focus, as in the novels by Brown and Harrison, Coonts's Minotaur (1989) and Timothy Rizzi's Nightstalker (1992).
23 This may have been due to Britain's decline as a military power after World War II, making it difficult for writers to put it at the center of this sort of story. This reality may also account for the outpouring of fiction about the Special Air Service at this time which-by focusing on an area where smaller, less affluent powers can be competitive-filled that gap in British popular fiction. (Tellingly, when Frederick Forsythe retold the story of Desert Storm as a Clancy-style techno-thriller in 1994's The Fist of God, it centered on the adventure of an SAS officer.) John Newsinger analyzes the phenomenon at length in Dangerous Men: The SAS and Popular Culture (London: Pluto Press, 1997).
24 Besides Clancy's Red Storm, Brown's Silver Tower and Harrison's Thunder of Erebus (1991), there were Harold Coyle's Team Yankee (1987) (which retold Hackett's 1978 tale from the viewpoint of an American tank crew) and Sword Point (1989); Ralph Peters's Red Army (1989); and Barrett Tillman's The Sixth Battle (1992).
25 In Clancy's Red Storm, the Soviet escalation of the conflict to the tactical nuclear level is narrowly averted by a coup in Moscow. Such plots were sometimes criticized as wishful thinking, historian Martin Van Creveld referring to Red Storm Rising in his annotated bibliography as the story of how World War III "will not happen." See Martin Van Creveld, The Transformation of War (New York: The Free Press, 1991).
26 Nader Elhefnawy, "Of Alternate Nineteenth Centuries," The Internet Review of Science Fiction (Jul. 2009). Accessed at http://www.irosf.com/q/zine/article/10562.
27 Robert Lekachman, "Virtuous Men and Perfect Weapons," New York Times, Jul. 27, 1986. Accessed at http://www.nytimes.com/1986/07/27/books/virtuous-men-and-perfect-weapons.html.
28 Clancy in particular would be celebrated and denigrated as the "minstrel of the military-industrial complex." See Walter Shapiro, "Of Arms and the Man," Time, Aug. 21, 1989. Accessed at http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,958400-1,00.html. Andrew Bacevich offers a more critical examination in The New American Militarism: How Americans Are Seduced By War (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), pp. 116-117.
29 John Clute, "Yore is Us," The Infinite Matrix, Nov. 29, 2001. Accessed at http://www.infinitematrix.net/columns/clute/clute1.html. Roughly analogous, and much more famous, are some of Jules Verne's works, particularly Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (1870), in which Captain Nemo uses his submarine Nautilus to exact revenge on the British Empire.
30 In the genre-defining British tale The Battle of Dorking, the German conquest is made feasible by the country's seizure of strategic North European coastlines and its clever use of deception against an overstretched and underprepared British Empire, new technologies playing only a supporting role (with the most notable the Germans' use of vaguely described "engines" to sink a part of the Royal Navy). By contrast, Stanley Waterloo's 1898 Armageddon-typical of the type-the airship Wild Goose enables the U.S. and its allies win a world war.
31 Franklin, pp. 131-134. In addition to the pre-World War I stories, this was also often the case in the early Cold War period when the U.S. had a monopoly on nuclear weaponry, though rare in the 1980s techno-thriller, where conflict (and its consequences) tended to be more constrained. Franklin, p. 52.
32 Jeff Nevins, "Introduction: The 19th Century Roots of Steampunk." In Ann & Jeff Vandermeer, Steampunk (San Fransisco, CA: Tachyon Publications, 2008), p. 10.
33 Tom Clancy in particular was given to never passing up an opportunity to insult the Soviets, in Red October even going so far as to denigrate the attractiveness of the models in the pornography Soviet sailors had in their lockers. Clancy, Red October, p. 420.
34 Dale Brown, The Flight of the Old Dog (New York: Donald I. Fine, 1987), p. 26. As anyone who has so much as glanced at a serious study of the Soviet economy realizes, this is a grossly oversimplistic picture, but the view had no shortage of adherents.
35 One such exception is Ralph Peters's 1989 Red Army, in which a divided Western alliance accedes to the Soviet conquest of West Germany rather than escalate the fight.
36 Anti-war space stories like Joe Haldeman's 1974 The Forever War; and low-tech space war stories, like Gordon R. Dickson's Dorsai novels (starting with 1959's Dorsai!), which posit technological advances canceling each other out so that warfare still came down to close combat between small groups of men with small arms; would seem less relevant to this particular tradition.
37 George and Meredith Friedman, The Future of War: Power, Technology and American World Dominance in the Twenty-First Century (New York: Random House, 1996), pp. 378-379.
38 Franklin discusses this extensively in War Stars, pp. 200-205.
39 A quick glance at the bestseller lists of the 2000s (and even the 1990s) shows no spy story writer enjoying the prominence of Robert Ludlum, Frederick Forsythe, Ken Follett and John le Carré in the 1970s and 1980s, Clancy excepted--as well as a lower profile for the genre in general. (One can access a large archive of the New York Times's bestseller lists dating back to the 1940s at the web site of Hawes Publications, http://www.hawes.com/.)
40 These concerns were not totally confined to fiction. George Friedman and Meredith LeBard published a nonfiction book making the case for the likelihood of such a conflict, The Coming War With Japan (New York: St. Martin's), 1991. Friedman recently attempted to rehabilitate this prediction in The Next 100 Years: A Forecast for the 21st Century (New York: Doubleday, 2009).
41 For a discussion of "enemyness" see Tom Engelhardt, The End of Victory Culture: Cold War America and the Disillusioning of a Generation, revised edition (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2007). This was already a problem even before the Cold War's end, as demonstrated by the climactic battle in Top Gun, where the Tomcat pilots engage anonymous black jets in a skirmish with a background underwritten to the point of absurdity.
42 Joe Buff is unique in having extended his saga of a Third World War fought between an Anglo-American alliance and a continentally dominant Germany across a half dozen books.
43 Saddam Hussein and his sons Uday and Qusay were particularly popular villains before his regime's overthrow, as in R.J. Pineiro's Ultimatum (1994) and Chris Stewart's Kill Box (1998).
44 This was also because many of these states had earlier been Soviet client states, now making do without their old friend or sponsor; and because the Cold War context that made local actions appear more globally significant had vanished.
45 It is worth noting that the lack of really big enemies for the U.S. military to face had become something of a joke, as in Michael Moore's political satire Canadian Bacon (1994).
46 Contemporary readers may be surprised to know that Chesney used these various techniques in The Battle of Dorking to make the danger of a German invasion of Britain appear more plausible. See the discussion in Elhefnawy, "Revisiting the Victorian Techno-thriller."
47 On a more modest scale, this was even done with criminal syndicates, as in Brown's Hammerheads (1990), where the villainous drug smuggler amasses a small air force complete with fighter jets (an idea also seen in film, notably 1990's Fire Birds and 1992's Aces: Iron Eagle III).
48 Richard Herman was particularly prone to invent situations in which small U.S. forces (often making do with less than the best equipment) were stuck battling a foe that ordinarily would be no match for American military power. In The Warbirds, only an American wing of F-4 Phantoms stands between a Soviet-backed Iran and the oil fields of the Persian Gulf. In Iron Gate (1995), U.S. forces are compelled to try and keep the peace in South Africa with just a handful of A-10s.
49 Nonetheless, the level of interest in such situations was low because the conflicts did not affect "U.S. national interest" as commonly construed, or fit into familiar narratives of heroes, villains and victims offering readers "instant drama." (Indeed, many potential situations, like the war in the Congo, were virtually ignored by the American media.) Still, a few books were written about relatively unfamiliar situations. Jim DeFelice's War Breaker concerned large-scale fighting between India and Pakistan, while James H. Cobb's Sea Fighter (2000) is set in West Africa.
50 Space warfare in particular became rare, given its place at the high end of the technological spectrum. Nonetheless, a number of novels treating the theme did appear, including Hagberg's By Dawn's Early Light (2003) and Dale Brown's Strike Force (2007) and Shadow Command (2008). Still, it may be that the more limited scale and context of most of these conflicts (and perhaps the passing of the Cold War's memory) made writers more likely to depict tactical nuclear war-fighting, as in the novels of Joe Buff and Dale Brown (particularly the latter's 2004 Plan of Attack).
51 It might also be noted that with Saddam Hussein overthrown in Iraq, a friendly regime installed in Afghanistan, Libya downgraded considerably as an adversary and China, Russia and Pakistan combating a common enemy along with the U.S.; and the prevailing piety being that the "War on Terror" trumped all other concerns in international politics; the list of potential enemies seemed shorter still to those given to thinking in these terms.
52 The market trends sheet can be found at the agency's web site, http://www.aeionline.com/. Of course, the situation was similar during the Vietnam War, which saw the release of only one Hollywood film about the subject during its course--the controversial The Green Berets (1968). Nonetheless, there were exceptions. The controversial television series 24 did well, and JAG did see a ratings spike in its last years, while the David Mamet-created The Unit (2006-), which began as a mid-season replacement, was also a hit.
53 Indeed, the absence of really successful films of this type may be one reason why the film version of Frank Miller's 300 (2007) was so quickly accepted as a metaphor for the conflict.
54 For the latter half of the 1990s, Harold Coyle also stopped writing techno-thrillers, instead producing a trio of historical novels, comprised of a two book Civil War saga-Look Away (1995) and Until the End (1996)-and the French and Indian War story, Savage Wilderness (1997).
55 Indeed, weak as the spy genre presently is, Vince Flynn, Brad Thor and Ted Bell have made more of a splash than these authors, while Cobb's most recent writing has been for the Robert Ludlum franchise's "Covert One" imprint.
56 In fact, the show's use of music has garnered it considerable attention. See Phil Gallo, "CBS Finds New Way to Use Tunes," Variety, Feb. 2, 2009. Accessed at http://www.variety.com/article/VR1117999433.html?categoryid=2857&cs=1.
57 Examples of these movies include Wesley Snipes's The Marksman (2005), Steven Seagal's Submerged (2005) and Flight of Fury (2007) and Jean-Claude Van Damme's Second in Command (2006). This was even the case with the sequels to the relatively successful Behind Enemy Lines, appearing in direct-to-video format in 2006 and 2009 (without Owen Wilson).
58 Already in 1996 Independence Day was a bigger hit than any movie in which American servicemen tackled a real-world opponent, and as of 2009, far and away the most commercially successful film about the "War on Terror" is Iron Man (2008), which simply scratched the Communists from the original Stan Lee plot and replaced them with Islamic fundamentalists. See Nader Elhefnawy, "Science Fiction and the Post-Cold War," Internet Review of Science Fiction, Jan. 2009. Accessed at http://www.irosf.com/q/zine/article/10498.
59 In that novel, set against the backdrop of the War on Terror's earliest days, an American businessman offers a laser weapon for sale on the international market, which he uses to disrupt the workings of an American reconnaissance satellite in a demonstration of its power. His prospective buyers, representatives of the Chinese and Indian governments, however, prove spectacularly uninterested in the product.
Back.
The Rise and Decline of the Military Techno-Thriller
Originally published (as "The Rise and Fall of the Military Techno-Thriller") in THE INTERNET REVIEW OF SCIENCE FICTION, November 2009
By Nader Elhefnawy
Arguably the most widely read science fiction of the 1980s, though rarely recognized as such, were the military techno-thrillers that topped the bestseller lists in that decade--novels like those written by Tom Clancy, Stephen Coonts, Dale Brown, Payne Harrison and Ralph Peters. The genre attracted little attention from serious critics in its heyday, and with the decline in its popularity it has received less attention of all kinds. Nonetheless, the place of these novels in a much longer history of such writing, and its connections with the science fiction tradition more broadly, are both well worth a look.
The Military Techno-Thriller: An Overview
As the "techno-thriller" label makes clear, these were thrillers in which the "techno" was central, in particular high-technology military weapons systems that were either very new recent, or believed likely to be available in the near term (as with the stealth bomber in the 1980s). The "thriller" aspect came from the weapon(s) being at the heart of an international crisis (again, supposed to be plausible in the foreseeable future), giving the machines and their operators the chance to do their thing.1
There were two basic plot structures, both epitomized by Tom Clancy's early writing. In the first, one side or the other in the conflict at the heart of the plot develops a key technology, which its rival wants to capture or neutralize-as in 1984's The Hunt for Red October, where Soviet naval captain Marko Ramius defects to the West with his country's latest ballistic missile submarine, instigating an international crisis.2 In the second type, an aggressive move by the Bad Guys forces the Good to wage large-scale combat to stop them, as in 1986's Red Storm Rising, where NATO battles a Soviet invasion of Western Europe.
In both cases the focus was on the development of the crisis, and the detailing of the military action. Given that the books' plausibility was key to their interest, there was a considerable emphasis on verisimilitude, routinely extending as far as the inclusion of earnest author's notes about the real-world relevance of their tales; lists of acknowledgements of technical advisors; research bibliographies; glossaries of the terminology used; and particularly in Dale Brown's case, the opening of novels with excerpts from real-world news sources pointing the way to the unfolding of the tale.
The authors' biographies also tended to emphasize their authority on the subject, pointing up their credentials as military veterans (like Stephen Coonts and Dale Brown), or at least, familial connections to the armed forces or membership in military associations. Some authors, capitalizing on their fiction, acquired a measure of status as "public intellectuals" on defense matters, including Tom Clancy and Ralph Peters.3
Across The Media Spectrum
These novels constituted one of the major publishing phenomena of the 1980s, of which Tom Clancy was perhaps the outstanding publishing success. His 1988 book The Cardinal of the Kremlin was the biggest selling novel in the United States its year, and Clear and Present Danger the biggest seller not just of 1989, but the whole decade.
Through the 1990s four of his books were the second-highest sellers in the American market in their years (1991's The Sum of All Fears, 1994's Debt of Honor, 1996's Executive Orders and 1998's Rainbow Six), while Without Remorse ended up in the number four slot for 1993 on Publisher's Weekly's annual list. This made him the fifth highest-selling author of that decade, after only John Grisham, Stephen King, Danielle Steele and Michael Crichton (all of whom, excepting Crichton, wrote many more books than Clancy did), while the three novels he published in the 2000s hit similar highs.4 All this enabled Clancy to "franchise" his brand name to an unprecedented extent.5
No other author came close, but many others enjoyed long, lucrative careers, particularly Dale Brown and Stephen Coonts, who likewise franchised their names (in the Dreamland and Deep Black series respectively).
The genre's impact was not limited to print. Hollywood's output of military-themed films during these years included quite a few starring high-tech machines. The high point of the trend was 1986's #1 box office hit, Top Gun, but there were also the Iron Eagle series (1986, 1988, 1992, 1995), Fire Birds (1990), Under Siege (1992, sequel 1995), Crimson Tide (1995), Broken Arrow (1996), Executive Decision (1996), and Behind Enemy Lines (2001, sequels 2006 and 2009)-as well as the films based on the Jack Ryan novels (1990, 1992, 1994, 2002), and Coonts's Flight of the Intruder (1991).
Spy films like The Peacemaker (1997) and the newer Bond films likewise reflected the trend, the Timothy Dalton-Pierce Brosnan era movies displaying an abundance of "ripped from the headlines" plot points and real-world military hardware.6 Goldeneye (1995) not only included post-Soviet power struggles, loose nukes and Russian Mafiosi in its storyline, but incorporated a Tiger helicopter, a flight of MiG-29s and a T-55 battle tank into the action, and even had Bond himself getting an important clue from a spy satellite's feed.
Television got in on the game, too, with a slew of naval aviation-themed dramas including CBS's Emerald Point N.A.S. (1983-1983), ABC's Supercarrier (1988), the syndicated Pensacola: Wings of Gold (1997-2000), and of course, NBC and CBS's JAG (1995-2005).7 Something of the approach was also evident in an array of other programs ranging from spy shows like 24 (2001-), to the presidential dramas The West Wing (1999-2006) and Commander in Chief (2005-2006), to science fiction shows like the UPN series Seven Days (1998-2001), in which military techno-thriller-type crises and weapons inspired the plots of roughly a third of the episodes.
Given that strategy games, tactical shooters and combat vehicle simulators have been an important part of video gaming from the beginning, the stuff of the techno-thriller was an obvious subject for it, and it may be here that the output was largest. Many video games using these themes were original titles, like Sega's After Burner (1987) and its sequels, or the Command & Conquer franchise, but others were based on successful films-and in some cases, successful books as well, Clancy again being particularly influential. His Red Storm Rising became the basis for a video game in 1988, but he made a deeper mark by cofounding Red Storm Entertainment in 1996, which launched the popular Rainbow Six and Ghost Recon series.
Inspirations and Precedents
The military techno-thriller did not appear out of nowhere, but rather had numerous precedents and sources of inspiration, some going all the way back to that wellspring of our imaginative fiction, the nineteenth century; and looking back at them provides powerful lenses for understanding the phenomenon.
Spy Novel 2.0
It is common to regard the techno-thriller as a development of the spy novel, and there are some grounds for viewing it as an update of the genre, in line with the changes in intelligence gathering during a twentieth century dominated by world wars and cold wars, and the technological metamorphosis of modern life. In place of the ad hoc operations and amateur operatives of an earlier time, intelligence became the purview of large, permanent (often multiple) bureaucracies staffed by salaried employees (only a very few of them "spies" in the traditional sense), in control of giant budgets and ultra-sophisticated equipment (like networks of listening posts and spy satellites), and which were typically involved in very slow, very long, very complex campaigns--a very far cry from the Bondian stereotype of lone supermen who single-handedly do all the legwork and black bag stuff and puzzle-solving and fighting needed to take down vast conspiracies and criminal empires in days.8
Perception lagged reality, of course, and the older image remains alive and well today. Nonetheless, spy fiction reflected the transformation of intelligence (and national security generally) into the territory of big, high-tech "alphabet soup" organizations from quite early on. This goes even for Ian Fleming's work-as in his careful detailing of the Soviet counterintelligence organization SMERSH in From Russia With Love (1957) (which opens with an author's note about the subject), or the "Vindicator" bomber's hijacking in Thunderball (1961). Martin Woodhouse's Giles Yeoman novels, like Tree Frog (1965), were also notable in centering on the adventures of a scientist involved in technical analysis.9
As all this was going on, Michael Crichton began a lucrative career telling stories starring the science instead of the people, and flaunting their research in ways that make fiction seem almost factual, as in his bestselling The Andromeda Strain (1969). While less rigorous in their handling of such details, Clive Cussler's Dirk Pitt novels (like 1976's Raise the Titanic!) are often identified as examples of this direction.10 If anything, this broader shift in fiction reinforced that trend, and there were two obvious responses to the increasingly inescapable change.
The first was to present lone protagonists in the most obvious way that they could be such: a situation compelling them to work outside (and often against) "the system" as a hapless outsider sucked into the intrigue, or an insider forced to go rogue-as in the novels of Robert Ludlum, Trevanian and James Grady.
The alternative was to embrace the new reality, Craig Thomas pushing the envelope with his "espionage adventure" Firefox (book 1977, film 1982) in which MI6 sends airman Mitchell Gant into the Soviet Union to steal a prototype "MiG-31." The result has been widely hailed as the first '80s-style techno-thriller but the approach was exemplified by Clancy, his books notable in their presenting not the story of a single character or group of characters, but a sweeping, intricate, even "epic" picture of the human and technical machinery of the American (and Soviet) national security state(s).
Rather than having his protagonist Jack Ryan conveniently turning up in the right place at the right time, every time, so as to dominate the narrative, the story's action is widely diffused among a large number of organizationally and geographically dispersed viewpoint characters.11 This includes a large number of minor ones, whose sole connection to one another is their playing some small part in the evolution of a common crisis; and whose sole function in the story is to provide a higher-resolution view of some particularly interesting bit of the larger situation.
As a result, the space given any one character tends to be limited. In The Hunt For Red October, for instance, scenes in which Ryan is even present comprise less than a third of the text.12 Near the middle, Ryan even disappears for a fifth of the book, these parts devoted instead to the intricate dance between U.S. and Soviet ships and aircraft in the North Atlantic, and giving great attention to incidents only loosely connected to the sub chase, like a skirmish between U.S. and Soviet fighter pilots.
Instead Ryan's centrality owes to his being bureaucratically positioned to see the situation only glimpsed in parts by the other "dramatis personae" as a comparative whole.13 Consequently, as one assessment of Clancy's Red Storm Rising puts it, not individuals but whole countries often come across as the really relevant "characters."14
The Return of the Invasion Story
It is worth noting that the modern spy story started to take shape as a genre in the years prior to World War I, often in connection with a different genre that also flourished at that time, and which was also influential on the '80s-era military techno-thriller: the "invasion story."15
George Chesney's 1871 novella The Battle of Dorking got the field started with its depiction of a German invasion of England in a combination of futuristic war drama with political propagandizing.16 The stories that followed in its footsteps flourished until World War I, the destructiveness of that war (and the still greater destructiveness expected of any war that followed given its precedent, and the maturing of air power and chemical weapons during its course) badly damaging the traditional view that war could be heroic, profitable or even justifiable.
This is not to say the invasion story vanished altogether.17 However, it was much rarer, while the view that modern technology made another major war likely to destroy civilization-a position H.G. Wells had already taken in pre-war works like The War in the Air (1907) and The World Set Free (1914)-was gaining wide acceptance. Taking their cue from Wells rather than Chesney writers depicting future armed conflicts increasingly presented images of irredeemable global catastrophe, as in Olaf Stapledon's Last and First Men (1930) and Star Maker (1937).
The tendency was reinforced by the Second World War and the arrival of the nuclear (and missile) age. Some authors apparently expected modern civilization to survive a nuclear war, Robert Heinlein often writing them into the background in 1950s-era novels like The Puppet Masters (1951) or The Door Into Summer (1957).18 While presenting more traumatized cultures as an outcome of such a situation, the same might also be said of George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four (1948) or Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 (1953).
However, the vision of modernity's complete collapse, or even the annihilation of the species, as presented by Aldous Huxley in Ape and Essence (1948), trumped them by the end of the 1950s, a thrust exemplified by the success of novels like Nevil Shute's On The Beach (1957), Walter Miller's A Canticle for Leibowitz (1959), and Mordechai Roshwald's Level 7 (1959). Some of these tales used the image of a shattered civilization as an argument for preparedness (or emphasized the danger of enemy triumph rather than nuclear war as such), but even the more militaristic images tended to "celebrate deterrence" rather than depict old style victories in the manner of Chesney and his imitators.19 Commenting on that absence in 1966 I.F. Clarke said that in the post-atomic age, "the tale of imaginary warfare as it used to be has vanished almost completely"-perhaps never to return.20
Yet that was exactly what happened a decade later. The more aggressive foreign policies of the Reagan-Thatcher era struck some observers as echoing politics in the heyday of Chesney, and not unrelated was the attention given the possibility of waging large-scale war in a pre-nuclear fashion. The early 1980s were a high point for the anti-nuclear movement, but the period also saw strategists reviewing the possibility that a major war might be fought without escalating to the level of a large-scale nuclear exchange.21 Some of the anticipations of this sort were specifically technological, the theorists picturing ballistic missile defenses checking strategic nuclear arsenals, while "smart" weapons replaced nuclear weapons in key roles-though others pictured new political and military strategies causing the scenarios to play out in these ways.22
Whichever the case, British authors led the way once again, with General John Hackett's The Third World War: August 1985 (1978), a full-blown war story of the kind not seen in decades, complete with large-scale air, land and sea battles. However, the books were to be a predominantly American phenomenon, particularly after the U.S. Naval Institute put Clancy's Red October into print in 1984.23
Still, while depictions of large-scale conventional fighting between Americans and Soviets were more common than before, they had to accommodate nuclear-age realities in a way pre-World War I invasion story writers never dreamed of (a fact which may have portended the tenuousness of the genre's revival).24 The danger of nuclear escalation was never far from the characters' minds, and the conflict tended to be carefully delimited by the author, the fight either ending after a very limited exchange (as in Hackett's scenario), or a breakdown of political will on the part of one of the belligerents.25
Additionally, many of the conflicts played out on a scale well below the level of even limited great power war, typically in one of two ways. This was simpler, obviously, in the case of stories revolving around the acquisition or neutralization of a technological development as discussed above, since these typically centered on small-scale, covert actions, like in Brown's Flight, Harrison's Storming Intrepid or Timothy Rizzi's Nightstalker (1992). There was also the option of staging the conflict between the U.S. and a militarily much weaker opponent, like a Soviet proxy or other "rogue state," as Stephen Coonts did with Libya in Final Flight (1986), Richard Herman did with Iran in The Warbirds (1989) and Larry Bond and Patrick Larkin did with North Korea and South Africa in Red Phoenix (1989) and Vortex (1991), respectively.
A Modern Day Edisonade
The hawkish foreign policies that characterized the late 1970s and 1980s were just one aspect of a broader conservative turn in that period, one that can fairly be read as "neo-Victorian," and the techno-thriller genre frequently reflected this.26 Robert Lekachman noted in his review of Red Storm Rising that Clancy's "characterizations are on a Victorian boys' book level," in that
This support of "traditional" values often extended to economic values as well, the 1970s and after seeing a rightward turn in economic thinking, the ideal of which was epitomized in the Thomas Edison-style inventor-entrepreneur-and the "Edisonade" celebrating him. As described by John Clute these stories (beginning with Edward J. Ellis's 1868 The Huge Hunter, or the Steam Man of the Prairies) typically center on
* More central to the story than in its European counterpart.30
* The work of a lone American genius.
* A device for enabling the U.S. to create a happier world order, whereas in the European tales (for instance, Wells's The War in the Air) the implications tended to be darker and more pessimistic.31
The discussion of the more recent echoes of the Edisonade tradition often view them as working subversively, critiquing or inverting the capitalistic, nationalistic and other values implicit in the stories, with steampunk in particular "a genre aware of its own loss of innocence" as Jeff Nevins put it in the introduction to last year's Steampunk anthology.32 However, this does not go for all of science fiction, the military techno-thriller certainly embracing the core idea in its tales of "Heroic Engineers."
Of course, in the late twentieth century it was not so simple a thing for a lone inventor to build a modern weapons system and use it at their discretion. Technological research and development is a less individualistic a matter than it once was, especially where high-tech weapons are concerned-one reason why such programs have long since been the preserve of vast national security states. Nonetheless, it was common for techno-thriller protagonists to help develop the weapons with which they fight, Dale Brown going furthest in this direction. Several of his characters, including Patrick McLanahan and his colleagues Wendy Tork, John Ormack, David Luger and Brad Elliott, are such warrior-engineers, as is Dr. Anne Page in Silver Tower, while millionaire whiz kid Jon Masters comes across as an even more direct update of the Edisonade protagonist.
Additionally, even while in government service, McLanahan demonstrates a strong possessiveness toward the systems he works on, using them at his own initiative so that even while wearing an Air Force uniform he is frequently all but autonomous. After retiring from the Air Force to start up his own company at the end of Shadow Command (2008), McLanahan actually departs with many of those weapons so that when he appears again in Rogue Forces (2009), he is making use of them as a private military entrepreneur.
It is also worth noting that even where a McLanahan-like figure is absent, the economic and technological values underlying the Edisonade remain present, not least a celebration of American technological ingenuity, American capitalism, and the relationship between the two (so that from the "country-as-a-character" perspective, plucky young America is readable as an Edison-style heroic inventor). This was especially the case in comparisons of it with the Soviet system, authors generally regarding it contemptuously, and capable of competing militarily with the capitalist West only because of its freedom from democratic constraints and humane impulses.33 As Dale Brown put it in The Flight of the Old Dog,
Children of Starship Troopers
While the three genres discussed above--the spy novel, the invasion story, and the Edisonade--were all set in something like the real world, the fourth and last of the genres being discussed here was conspicuously set outside of it: "hard" military science fiction of the sort commonly set in the far future, or in outer space.
This style of story (seen by some as a continuation of the invasion story in safer, more distant territory) is at least as old as space opera, human beings participating in high-tech battles on other planets at least as early as E.E. Smith's The Skylark of Space (1928), where Richard Seaton and his companions find themselves and their starship in the middle of the war between Kondal and Mardonale on the planet Osnome.
The output of such fiction in the years that followed was prolific, and understandably so; space is big enough, and the future technologically and politically distant enough, that a writer could imagine nuclear-age constraints not applying. Of course, the absence of those constraints could be, and were, used to just about every conceivable end to which a war story could be put.
The really relevant one for the techno-thriller was the combination of a martial (or even militaristic) outlook with relatively rigorous technological extrapolation. Again the tradition goes back at least to Smith (particularly in the Lensman novels), but is arguably exemplified by Robert Heinlein's classic Starship Troopers (1959). In this, and in the book's devotion of considerable swaths of the text to detailed descriptions of the recruitment, training, organization, staffing and equipment of the Terran Mobile Infantry, Troopers comes across as a "spiritual ancestor" for the books by Clancy, Brown and others in the 1980s and after.36
This also goes for some of the innovations Heinlein presented in that novel, in particular the "powered armor" used by Terran Mobile Infantrymen like his protagonist Juan Rico. This has not only been widely imitated in other science fiction, but also widely taken as a source of inspiration by military thinkers speculating about the next big thing in land warfare, frequently picturing the future infantryman inside an armored, high-tech exoskeleton, and often referring to the CAP troopers of Heinlein's novel in making its point.37 Not surprisingly, it has itself appeared in many a techno-thriller, as with many of the Dale Brown novels from The Tin Man (1998) on.
Sometimes, however, there was an even more direct influence. Throughout his career Heinlein took a strong interest in real-world defense policy, and the same goes for other military science fiction writers (and editors) like Jerry Pournelle, David Drake, Ben Bova and Jim Baen, who advocated a hard line in the Cold War and a heavy investment in military technology to support it. They were particularly vocal in the 1970s and early 1980s regarding initiatives later prominent in techno-thriller writing, like missile defense, with Pournelle himself even being credited with the "Rods From God" concept for a space-based weapon.38
Continued.
By Nader Elhefnawy
Arguably the most widely read science fiction of the 1980s, though rarely recognized as such, were the military techno-thrillers that topped the bestseller lists in that decade--novels like those written by Tom Clancy, Stephen Coonts, Dale Brown, Payne Harrison and Ralph Peters. The genre attracted little attention from serious critics in its heyday, and with the decline in its popularity it has received less attention of all kinds. Nonetheless, the place of these novels in a much longer history of such writing, and its connections with the science fiction tradition more broadly, are both well worth a look.
The Military Techno-Thriller: An Overview
As the "techno-thriller" label makes clear, these were thrillers in which the "techno" was central, in particular high-technology military weapons systems that were either very new recent, or believed likely to be available in the near term (as with the stealth bomber in the 1980s). The "thriller" aspect came from the weapon(s) being at the heart of an international crisis (again, supposed to be plausible in the foreseeable future), giving the machines and their operators the chance to do their thing.1
There were two basic plot structures, both epitomized by Tom Clancy's early writing. In the first, one side or the other in the conflict at the heart of the plot develops a key technology, which its rival wants to capture or neutralize-as in 1984's The Hunt for Red October, where Soviet naval captain Marko Ramius defects to the West with his country's latest ballistic missile submarine, instigating an international crisis.2 In the second type, an aggressive move by the Bad Guys forces the Good to wage large-scale combat to stop them, as in 1986's Red Storm Rising, where NATO battles a Soviet invasion of Western Europe.
In both cases the focus was on the development of the crisis, and the detailing of the military action. Given that the books' plausibility was key to their interest, there was a considerable emphasis on verisimilitude, routinely extending as far as the inclusion of earnest author's notes about the real-world relevance of their tales; lists of acknowledgements of technical advisors; research bibliographies; glossaries of the terminology used; and particularly in Dale Brown's case, the opening of novels with excerpts from real-world news sources pointing the way to the unfolding of the tale.
The authors' biographies also tended to emphasize their authority on the subject, pointing up their credentials as military veterans (like Stephen Coonts and Dale Brown), or at least, familial connections to the armed forces or membership in military associations. Some authors, capitalizing on their fiction, acquired a measure of status as "public intellectuals" on defense matters, including Tom Clancy and Ralph Peters.3
Across The Media Spectrum
These novels constituted one of the major publishing phenomena of the 1980s, of which Tom Clancy was perhaps the outstanding publishing success. His 1988 book The Cardinal of the Kremlin was the biggest selling novel in the United States its year, and Clear and Present Danger the biggest seller not just of 1989, but the whole decade.
Through the 1990s four of his books were the second-highest sellers in the American market in their years (1991's The Sum of All Fears, 1994's Debt of Honor, 1996's Executive Orders and 1998's Rainbow Six), while Without Remorse ended up in the number four slot for 1993 on Publisher's Weekly's annual list. This made him the fifth highest-selling author of that decade, after only John Grisham, Stephen King, Danielle Steele and Michael Crichton (all of whom, excepting Crichton, wrote many more books than Clancy did), while the three novels he published in the 2000s hit similar highs.4 All this enabled Clancy to "franchise" his brand name to an unprecedented extent.5
No other author came close, but many others enjoyed long, lucrative careers, particularly Dale Brown and Stephen Coonts, who likewise franchised their names (in the Dreamland and Deep Black series respectively).
The genre's impact was not limited to print. Hollywood's output of military-themed films during these years included quite a few starring high-tech machines. The high point of the trend was 1986's #1 box office hit, Top Gun, but there were also the Iron Eagle series (1986, 1988, 1992, 1995), Fire Birds (1990), Under Siege (1992, sequel 1995), Crimson Tide (1995), Broken Arrow (1996), Executive Decision (1996), and Behind Enemy Lines (2001, sequels 2006 and 2009)-as well as the films based on the Jack Ryan novels (1990, 1992, 1994, 2002), and Coonts's Flight of the Intruder (1991).
Spy films like The Peacemaker (1997) and the newer Bond films likewise reflected the trend, the Timothy Dalton-Pierce Brosnan era movies displaying an abundance of "ripped from the headlines" plot points and real-world military hardware.6 Goldeneye (1995) not only included post-Soviet power struggles, loose nukes and Russian Mafiosi in its storyline, but incorporated a Tiger helicopter, a flight of MiG-29s and a T-55 battle tank into the action, and even had Bond himself getting an important clue from a spy satellite's feed.
Television got in on the game, too, with a slew of naval aviation-themed dramas including CBS's Emerald Point N.A.S. (1983-1983), ABC's Supercarrier (1988), the syndicated Pensacola: Wings of Gold (1997-2000), and of course, NBC and CBS's JAG (1995-2005).7 Something of the approach was also evident in an array of other programs ranging from spy shows like 24 (2001-), to the presidential dramas The West Wing (1999-2006) and Commander in Chief (2005-2006), to science fiction shows like the UPN series Seven Days (1998-2001), in which military techno-thriller-type crises and weapons inspired the plots of roughly a third of the episodes.
Given that strategy games, tactical shooters and combat vehicle simulators have been an important part of video gaming from the beginning, the stuff of the techno-thriller was an obvious subject for it, and it may be here that the output was largest. Many video games using these themes were original titles, like Sega's After Burner (1987) and its sequels, or the Command & Conquer franchise, but others were based on successful films-and in some cases, successful books as well, Clancy again being particularly influential. His Red Storm Rising became the basis for a video game in 1988, but he made a deeper mark by cofounding Red Storm Entertainment in 1996, which launched the popular Rainbow Six and Ghost Recon series.
Inspirations and Precedents
The military techno-thriller did not appear out of nowhere, but rather had numerous precedents and sources of inspiration, some going all the way back to that wellspring of our imaginative fiction, the nineteenth century; and looking back at them provides powerful lenses for understanding the phenomenon.
Spy Novel 2.0
It is common to regard the techno-thriller as a development of the spy novel, and there are some grounds for viewing it as an update of the genre, in line with the changes in intelligence gathering during a twentieth century dominated by world wars and cold wars, and the technological metamorphosis of modern life. In place of the ad hoc operations and amateur operatives of an earlier time, intelligence became the purview of large, permanent (often multiple) bureaucracies staffed by salaried employees (only a very few of them "spies" in the traditional sense), in control of giant budgets and ultra-sophisticated equipment (like networks of listening posts and spy satellites), and which were typically involved in very slow, very long, very complex campaigns--a very far cry from the Bondian stereotype of lone supermen who single-handedly do all the legwork and black bag stuff and puzzle-solving and fighting needed to take down vast conspiracies and criminal empires in days.8
Perception lagged reality, of course, and the older image remains alive and well today. Nonetheless, spy fiction reflected the transformation of intelligence (and national security generally) into the territory of big, high-tech "alphabet soup" organizations from quite early on. This goes even for Ian Fleming's work-as in his careful detailing of the Soviet counterintelligence organization SMERSH in From Russia With Love (1957) (which opens with an author's note about the subject), or the "Vindicator" bomber's hijacking in Thunderball (1961). Martin Woodhouse's Giles Yeoman novels, like Tree Frog (1965), were also notable in centering on the adventures of a scientist involved in technical analysis.9
As all this was going on, Michael Crichton began a lucrative career telling stories starring the science instead of the people, and flaunting their research in ways that make fiction seem almost factual, as in his bestselling The Andromeda Strain (1969). While less rigorous in their handling of such details, Clive Cussler's Dirk Pitt novels (like 1976's Raise the Titanic!) are often identified as examples of this direction.10 If anything, this broader shift in fiction reinforced that trend, and there were two obvious responses to the increasingly inescapable change.
The first was to present lone protagonists in the most obvious way that they could be such: a situation compelling them to work outside (and often against) "the system" as a hapless outsider sucked into the intrigue, or an insider forced to go rogue-as in the novels of Robert Ludlum, Trevanian and James Grady.
The alternative was to embrace the new reality, Craig Thomas pushing the envelope with his "espionage adventure" Firefox (book 1977, film 1982) in which MI6 sends airman Mitchell Gant into the Soviet Union to steal a prototype "MiG-31." The result has been widely hailed as the first '80s-style techno-thriller but the approach was exemplified by Clancy, his books notable in their presenting not the story of a single character or group of characters, but a sweeping, intricate, even "epic" picture of the human and technical machinery of the American (and Soviet) national security state(s).
Rather than having his protagonist Jack Ryan conveniently turning up in the right place at the right time, every time, so as to dominate the narrative, the story's action is widely diffused among a large number of organizationally and geographically dispersed viewpoint characters.11 This includes a large number of minor ones, whose sole connection to one another is their playing some small part in the evolution of a common crisis; and whose sole function in the story is to provide a higher-resolution view of some particularly interesting bit of the larger situation.
As a result, the space given any one character tends to be limited. In The Hunt For Red October, for instance, scenes in which Ryan is even present comprise less than a third of the text.12 Near the middle, Ryan even disappears for a fifth of the book, these parts devoted instead to the intricate dance between U.S. and Soviet ships and aircraft in the North Atlantic, and giving great attention to incidents only loosely connected to the sub chase, like a skirmish between U.S. and Soviet fighter pilots.
Instead Ryan's centrality owes to his being bureaucratically positioned to see the situation only glimpsed in parts by the other "dramatis personae" as a comparative whole.13 Consequently, as one assessment of Clancy's Red Storm Rising puts it, not individuals but whole countries often come across as the really relevant "characters."14
The Return of the Invasion Story
It is worth noting that the modern spy story started to take shape as a genre in the years prior to World War I, often in connection with a different genre that also flourished at that time, and which was also influential on the '80s-era military techno-thriller: the "invasion story."15
George Chesney's 1871 novella The Battle of Dorking got the field started with its depiction of a German invasion of England in a combination of futuristic war drama with political propagandizing.16 The stories that followed in its footsteps flourished until World War I, the destructiveness of that war (and the still greater destructiveness expected of any war that followed given its precedent, and the maturing of air power and chemical weapons during its course) badly damaging the traditional view that war could be heroic, profitable or even justifiable.
This is not to say the invasion story vanished altogether.17 However, it was much rarer, while the view that modern technology made another major war likely to destroy civilization-a position H.G. Wells had already taken in pre-war works like The War in the Air (1907) and The World Set Free (1914)-was gaining wide acceptance. Taking their cue from Wells rather than Chesney writers depicting future armed conflicts increasingly presented images of irredeemable global catastrophe, as in Olaf Stapledon's Last and First Men (1930) and Star Maker (1937).
The tendency was reinforced by the Second World War and the arrival of the nuclear (and missile) age. Some authors apparently expected modern civilization to survive a nuclear war, Robert Heinlein often writing them into the background in 1950s-era novels like The Puppet Masters (1951) or The Door Into Summer (1957).18 While presenting more traumatized cultures as an outcome of such a situation, the same might also be said of George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four (1948) or Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 (1953).
However, the vision of modernity's complete collapse, or even the annihilation of the species, as presented by Aldous Huxley in Ape and Essence (1948), trumped them by the end of the 1950s, a thrust exemplified by the success of novels like Nevil Shute's On The Beach (1957), Walter Miller's A Canticle for Leibowitz (1959), and Mordechai Roshwald's Level 7 (1959). Some of these tales used the image of a shattered civilization as an argument for preparedness (or emphasized the danger of enemy triumph rather than nuclear war as such), but even the more militaristic images tended to "celebrate deterrence" rather than depict old style victories in the manner of Chesney and his imitators.19 Commenting on that absence in 1966 I.F. Clarke said that in the post-atomic age, "the tale of imaginary warfare as it used to be has vanished almost completely"-perhaps never to return.20
Yet that was exactly what happened a decade later. The more aggressive foreign policies of the Reagan-Thatcher era struck some observers as echoing politics in the heyday of Chesney, and not unrelated was the attention given the possibility of waging large-scale war in a pre-nuclear fashion. The early 1980s were a high point for the anti-nuclear movement, but the period also saw strategists reviewing the possibility that a major war might be fought without escalating to the level of a large-scale nuclear exchange.21 Some of the anticipations of this sort were specifically technological, the theorists picturing ballistic missile defenses checking strategic nuclear arsenals, while "smart" weapons replaced nuclear weapons in key roles-though others pictured new political and military strategies causing the scenarios to play out in these ways.22
Whichever the case, British authors led the way once again, with General John Hackett's The Third World War: August 1985 (1978), a full-blown war story of the kind not seen in decades, complete with large-scale air, land and sea battles. However, the books were to be a predominantly American phenomenon, particularly after the U.S. Naval Institute put Clancy's Red October into print in 1984.23
Still, while depictions of large-scale conventional fighting between Americans and Soviets were more common than before, they had to accommodate nuclear-age realities in a way pre-World War I invasion story writers never dreamed of (a fact which may have portended the tenuousness of the genre's revival).24 The danger of nuclear escalation was never far from the characters' minds, and the conflict tended to be carefully delimited by the author, the fight either ending after a very limited exchange (as in Hackett's scenario), or a breakdown of political will on the part of one of the belligerents.25
Additionally, many of the conflicts played out on a scale well below the level of even limited great power war, typically in one of two ways. This was simpler, obviously, in the case of stories revolving around the acquisition or neutralization of a technological development as discussed above, since these typically centered on small-scale, covert actions, like in Brown's Flight, Harrison's Storming Intrepid or Timothy Rizzi's Nightstalker (1992). There was also the option of staging the conflict between the U.S. and a militarily much weaker opponent, like a Soviet proxy or other "rogue state," as Stephen Coonts did with Libya in Final Flight (1986), Richard Herman did with Iran in The Warbirds (1989) and Larry Bond and Patrick Larkin did with North Korea and South Africa in Red Phoenix (1989) and Vortex (1991), respectively.
A Modern Day Edisonade
The hawkish foreign policies that characterized the late 1970s and 1980s were just one aspect of a broader conservative turn in that period, one that can fairly be read as "neo-Victorian," and the techno-thriller genre frequently reflected this.26 Robert Lekachman noted in his review of Red Storm Rising that Clancy's "characterizations are on a Victorian boys' book level," in that
All the Americans are paragons of courage, endurance and devotion to service and country. Their officers are uniformly competent and occasionally inspired. Men of all ranks are faithful husbands and devoted fathers.27Minor as the role of character in such fiction was, comforting affirmations of traditional values were apparently a factor in their appeal for many readers, and their cultural impact. Indeed, many an observer has argued that they helped facilitate the political "rehabilitation" of the public image of the U.S. military (and indeed, of the resort to force) after Vietnam.28
This support of "traditional" values often extended to economic values as well, the 1970s and after seeing a rightward turn in economic thinking, the ideal of which was epitomized in the Thomas Edison-style inventor-entrepreneur-and the "Edisonade" celebrating him. As described by John Clute these stories (beginning with Edward J. Ellis's 1868 The Huge Hunter, or the Steam Man of the Prairies) typically center on
a brave young inventor [who] creates a tool or a weapon (or both) that enables him to save the girl and his nation (America) and the world from some menace, whether it be foreigners or evil scientists or aliens; and gets the girl; and gets rich.29Given such a plot structure, these stories unsurprisingly overlapped with the American version of the invasion story, which, as H. Bruce Franklin argues in War Stars: The Superweapon and the American Imagination, tended to be
* More central to the story than in its European counterpart.30
* The work of a lone American genius.
* A device for enabling the U.S. to create a happier world order, whereas in the European tales (for instance, Wells's The War in the Air) the implications tended to be darker and more pessimistic.31
The discussion of the more recent echoes of the Edisonade tradition often view them as working subversively, critiquing or inverting the capitalistic, nationalistic and other values implicit in the stories, with steampunk in particular "a genre aware of its own loss of innocence" as Jeff Nevins put it in the introduction to last year's Steampunk anthology.32 However, this does not go for all of science fiction, the military techno-thriller certainly embracing the core idea in its tales of "Heroic Engineers."
Of course, in the late twentieth century it was not so simple a thing for a lone inventor to build a modern weapons system and use it at their discretion. Technological research and development is a less individualistic a matter than it once was, especially where high-tech weapons are concerned-one reason why such programs have long since been the preserve of vast national security states. Nonetheless, it was common for techno-thriller protagonists to help develop the weapons with which they fight, Dale Brown going furthest in this direction. Several of his characters, including Patrick McLanahan and his colleagues Wendy Tork, John Ormack, David Luger and Brad Elliott, are such warrior-engineers, as is Dr. Anne Page in Silver Tower, while millionaire whiz kid Jon Masters comes across as an even more direct update of the Edisonade protagonist.
Additionally, even while in government service, McLanahan demonstrates a strong possessiveness toward the systems he works on, using them at his own initiative so that even while wearing an Air Force uniform he is frequently all but autonomous. After retiring from the Air Force to start up his own company at the end of Shadow Command (2008), McLanahan actually departs with many of those weapons so that when he appears again in Rogue Forces (2009), he is making use of them as a private military entrepreneur.
It is also worth noting that even where a McLanahan-like figure is absent, the economic and technological values underlying the Edisonade remain present, not least a celebration of American technological ingenuity, American capitalism, and the relationship between the two (so that from the "country-as-a-character" perspective, plucky young America is readable as an Edison-style heroic inventor). This was especially the case in comparisons of it with the Soviet system, authors generally regarding it contemptuously, and capable of competing militarily with the capitalist West only because of its freedom from democratic constraints and humane impulses.33 As Dale Brown put it in The Flight of the Old Dog,
The Russians play by a whole different set of rules than we do. They don't answer to Congress, the press, the public, or the world . . . If they want a laser defense system now, they build one. If they need more money, they buy twenty percent less meat and thirty percent less toilet paper and to hell with public opinion.34Of course, the outcome was rarely in doubt were the U.S. to play its cards right-never a certainty, with writers routinely presenting their protagonists as bedeviled by the kind of hostile media and skeptical legislators liberals only wish existed, and unreliable foreign allies. However, their heroes almost always won the day in spite of them.35
Children of Starship Troopers
While the three genres discussed above--the spy novel, the invasion story, and the Edisonade--were all set in something like the real world, the fourth and last of the genres being discussed here was conspicuously set outside of it: "hard" military science fiction of the sort commonly set in the far future, or in outer space.
This style of story (seen by some as a continuation of the invasion story in safer, more distant territory) is at least as old as space opera, human beings participating in high-tech battles on other planets at least as early as E.E. Smith's The Skylark of Space (1928), where Richard Seaton and his companions find themselves and their starship in the middle of the war between Kondal and Mardonale on the planet Osnome.
The output of such fiction in the years that followed was prolific, and understandably so; space is big enough, and the future technologically and politically distant enough, that a writer could imagine nuclear-age constraints not applying. Of course, the absence of those constraints could be, and were, used to just about every conceivable end to which a war story could be put.
The really relevant one for the techno-thriller was the combination of a martial (or even militaristic) outlook with relatively rigorous technological extrapolation. Again the tradition goes back at least to Smith (particularly in the Lensman novels), but is arguably exemplified by Robert Heinlein's classic Starship Troopers (1959). In this, and in the book's devotion of considerable swaths of the text to detailed descriptions of the recruitment, training, organization, staffing and equipment of the Terran Mobile Infantry, Troopers comes across as a "spiritual ancestor" for the books by Clancy, Brown and others in the 1980s and after.36
This also goes for some of the innovations Heinlein presented in that novel, in particular the "powered armor" used by Terran Mobile Infantrymen like his protagonist Juan Rico. This has not only been widely imitated in other science fiction, but also widely taken as a source of inspiration by military thinkers speculating about the next big thing in land warfare, frequently picturing the future infantryman inside an armored, high-tech exoskeleton, and often referring to the CAP troopers of Heinlein's novel in making its point.37 Not surprisingly, it has itself appeared in many a techno-thriller, as with many of the Dale Brown novels from The Tin Man (1998) on.
Sometimes, however, there was an even more direct influence. Throughout his career Heinlein took a strong interest in real-world defense policy, and the same goes for other military science fiction writers (and editors) like Jerry Pournelle, David Drake, Ben Bova and Jim Baen, who advocated a hard line in the Cold War and a heavy investment in military technology to support it. They were particularly vocal in the 1970s and early 1980s regarding initiatives later prominent in techno-thriller writing, like missile defense, with Pournelle himself even being credited with the "Rods From God" concept for a space-based weapon.38
Continued.
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