When I was in middle and high school, I was a Star Wars geek. Besides binge-reading RPG sourcebooks, I was a big fan of the 90s Bantam novels, particularly those of Timothy Zahn and Michael Stackpole, which are generally considered to be the best of that vintage.1 But there was one other author from that era who I really liked, despite his stuff being rather more obscure. It was Michael P. Kube-McDowell's Black Fleet Crisis trilogy, and it took me quite a while to work out why I liked it so much.2
Unlike anyone else I've read in Star Wars, Kube-McDowell captured the flavor of a real-world military. There's the sense of dealing with an immense machine, made up of a zillion moving parts and roughly focused on a goal, with all of the scars of bureaucracy and lessons learned that implies. This starts on the first page of Chapter 1: "At the same time, the carriers and cruisers began to disgorge the bombers, transports, and gunboats they had ferried to the battle. There was no reason to risk the loss of one fully loaded—a lesson the Republic had learned in pain. At Orinda, the commander of the fleet carrier Endurance had kept his pilots waiting in the launch bays, to protect the smaller craft from Imperial fire as long as possible. They were still there when Endurance took the brunt of a Super Star Destroyer attack and vanished in a ball of metal fire." This is an excellent example of doctrine, dropped naturally into the text, a subject often ignored in fiction. Later on, we get a rough TOE for a New Republic Fleet3 and other doctrinal asides, as well as the general sense that we're looking at a group of dedicated professionals, not just a bunch of people having an adventure fighting the threat of the week who also happen to have ranks.4
Now, to be clear, I'm starting with Star Wars mostly because it's a very stark example of the point I'm trying to make. There's a certain way of working that is ingrained into any sort of serious modern military5 and that most authors are bad at capturing. In a real-world context, Tom Clancy is one of the better examples of this. For all of the many flaws in his later books, he really, deeply understood how a military thought and worked, and it comes through in his work.
The reason I bring this up is that fiction at its best gives a view into a world very different from the reader's own, in a way that is difficult to match from non-fiction sources. This is generally pretty easy to see when talking about history, and to pick the most obvious example, Patrick O'Brien's Aubrey-Maturin series is a vivid depiction of the Napoleonic RN, everything from the details of sailing a ship to the food to the way people thought about the Navy. And I think good military fiction can do this, helping to bridge the information gap between the military and society more broadly, at least on a gut level. But for reasons that I will leave as an exercise to the reader, this doesn't seem to be broadly recognized in discussions of literature.
Nor is Star Wars the only place this pops up in science fiction. Another good example is David Weber's Honorverse series.6 Although notionally based on the Napoleonic RN, the flavor of the RMN as an organization is quite modern, with a bit of antique garnish. I'm not sure how much of this is deliberate on Weber's part,7 but I tend to think that a lot of it is that social structures and technology are intertwined, and the technology of the Honorverse is recognizably far more modern than Napoleonic, with the obvious exception of replicating the isolation of commanders far away from their posts. But when you have radio, even if it's only for tactical use, a lot of stuff changes. In some of the later books, we see characters grappling with tactical and technological changes in a way that is intimately familiar to anyone who has followed the last hundred of military history, but would be quite alien before the late 19th century.
An interesting contrast to the Honorverse is David Drake's RCN series, intended as Aubrey-Maturin In Space to Weber's Hornblower In Space. Drake deliberately set his social structures very far away from modernity, with the Navy patterned on the RN of the late 17th and early 18th century and the civilian world on the Roman Republic. The results are rather alien, with the characters thinking about such things very differently from either modern civilians or the modern military. And this one is definitely deliberate on Drake's part, as he was a Vietnam vet and his Hammer's Slammers series is heavily based on his experience there. Of course, military experience isn't required to pull this off. Most of the authors listed above aren't veterans, and there's an interesting parallel to another book, the Martian, where several readers asked the author who had advised him on the culture at NASA, and he said it wasn't anybody in particular, he had just read a ton of stuff on it. I had a similar experience when I went aboard America and the most surprising thing was how familiar everything felt.
I should probably close by noting that although I've talked about "the" flavor of the military, it's not quite as unified as that. The military is big, and while there are are definite commonalities, the experience of a junior enlisted in the Army is going to be different from that of, say, a naval officer. The latter is probably more valuable in terms of understanding the larger military as a system, which is where my interest tends to center. Once you get that deep down, certain types of problems are obviously ruled out, while others are pretty likely, but it's hard to explain why this is to people who don't get it. I hadn't previously thought about the ability of fiction to bridge this gap, and I'm interested to see if anyone else has suggestions for books8 which might be able to do the same thing.
1 Seriously, the Thrawn books are excellent. I re-read them a while ago, and was astonished at how good they were as both Star Wars and as books. ⇑
2 For those who have read it: I am talking about the Leia-Yevetha plotline here. The Lando plotline is mostly not about the military, although it has some of the same effect. The less said about the Luke plotline, the better. ⇑
3 It's ludicrously undersized for the Star Wars universe (which has always had trouble with scale) but it's better than the "Ackbar and Wedge and whatever ships the author thought sounded cool" that pervades other Star Wars books. ⇑
4 I'm thinking in particular of the X-wing books, which are quite good novels, theoretically about a military unit, but which definitely don't feel like they're talking about a serious military. And for serious Star Wars geeks, I know that they take place much earlier in the New Republic's history than the Black Fleet Crisis series. I don't think this is a case of authorial tailoring, given how much the Dark Tide novels feel like the X-wing books. ⇑
5 I'm not sure offhand exactly when this started, and my sense, of, say, the Napoleonic RN is rather different, but I think it's safe to say that we're talking 1900 on. ⇑
6 To preempt inevitable comments, I am not commenting on Honor as a character when I bring this up. ⇑
7 The obvious contrast is his Safehold series, which definitely reads a lot less as being that of a modern military, although I do think those tend to be a bit more modern than is probably justified by the setting. ⇑
8 I think that the nature of other types of entertainment tends to make them much more poorly suited for this, as evidenced by all of my various movie reviews, but if there are things which do it well, feel free to suggest them. ⇑
Comments
Another excellent series in that vein is David Weber & Steve White's 'Starfire'. Especially the 'In Death Ground' and 'The Shiva Option'. Massive fleet actions with humans and allies against an enemy that can't be reasoned with because it can't communicate with them and considers every other lifeform....food.
I have to say, even though I liked Star Wars as a kid, and also enjoyed some military fiction like Patrick O'Brien or Tom Clancy... I never really liked Star Wars as "military fiction" the way some people do.
This is a series of movies that laughs in your face at any attempt at logical consistency. It does so both for philosophical reasons- the pacificistic yoda and restrained Obi-Wan are presented as being somehow "higher" than the violent Sith- and also for world-building reasons. "War not make one great" and "The ability to destroy a planet is insignificant next to the power of the Force." In other words, this is a universe where it literally does not matter how many battleships you have or what firepower they have- one good Jedi with "the force" will always find a way to stop them.
As an adult I do appreciate that kind of artistic flair, but that's the complete opposite of "military fiction." It would be like telling a story where the entire American Revolution comes down to the duel between Hamilton and Burr. Or a made-up story where there's a samurai duel going on during Midway on the bridge of the Yamato, and somehow that duel decides the entire battle and war because "psychic force meditation" or whatever. If such a thing had happened, I'm sure it would have been very dramatic for the people involved, but it wouldn't actually matter to the larger war. Which is why I appreciate fiction for what it is, and don't need an author to try and make it "real." I don't get the draw of buying into the larger "Star Wars universe" and trying to study how many megatons of firepower the turbolasers have, because (a) this is fiction and (b) the movies are directly telling me that stuff doesn't matter.
Oh, I agree that almost all Star Wars is very bad as specifically military fiction, with the exception of the Black Fleet Crisis series. I started with Star Wars mostly because it was the first place I'd noticed the difference I'm trying to point at here, probably because the difference shows up better when you have the kind of contrast with the rest of the universe. And there are probably people who really dislike those books for the same reason I really like them, but it provided a useful springboard to talk about something I've been thinking about for a while.
Oh, the stand-alone books by Tim Zahn are even better then his SW books, like the recent reboot of the good ship Icarus.
Also, if you were in RPGs ("Oh dear, how sad, never mind...") you should check the book by Marc Miller (good) and the books by Frank Chadwick (very good), all published by Baen.
My previous comment was about Space Opera, but the cited books have little military action, but it's not completely accent.
For the Royal Navy during the Napoleonic Wars I can recommend the Richard Bolitho/Adam Bolitho books by Alexander Kent.
For the Royal Navy during World War II I can recomment the books by Douglas Reeman.
NB that Alexander Kent was a pen name of Douglas Reeman... :-D
https://www.douglasreeman.com/
68 novel and anthologies on the Royal Navy...
@Rocket J Squirrel please note that David Weber, before starting writing books, was a game author, and the third edition of the game Starfire by Task Force Games was mostly his work.
AJ Gyles:
Single Combat seems to just be a really common theme in literature, not so common in real life, but, the Force doesn't exist in real life either.
AJ Gyles:
You're asking about science fiction fans, doesn't that explain it?
That said there is a faction of Star Wars fanboys that seems to think all that matters is making the ships of Star Wars more powerful than the ships of Star Trek.
Rocket J Squirrel:
I really liked those books on the first read, but later concluded that they are way too "WWII Pacific Theater IN SPACE" for me. Especially near the end when they drop all pretense and literally name planets after Pacific islands.
The implicit equating of the Arachnids and the Japanese rubs me the wrong way on a couple of levels, but I think the worst is this: If there's anything we can learn from WWII, it's that those horrible things were done by people not so different from you and me, not giant tarantula-starfish from space. I think pretending otherwise is detrimental to the project of making yourself the kind of person who would not do those things.
David Friedman's Harald is too medieval to tell you much about military culture...but it's the only book I've read to really take logistics seriously. Nearly every campaign is won by an attack on logistics, not a big set-piece battle.
Another non-modern recommendation: the series The Deed of Paksennarion, by Elizabeth Moon. It takes seriously problems such as 'how to march a unit down a muddy road' and 'why are messengers and scouts highly regarded'.
If we’re talking about literature, count me in. I agree that fiction (print and screen) helps us understand other cultures, including military culture. The novel may be one of the best tools humans ever devised to help us get along with other humans. I also agree that most fiction about war or the military is more like “a bunch of people having an adventure fighting the threat of the week who also happen to have ranks” than real life. That’s Star Trek! (Star Fleet claims not to be a military organization, but all of their ships are armed to the teeth and the Federation is always going toe-to-toe with somebody who looked at us the wrong way.)
I’ll also add that too many writers resort to the plot gimmick of making the highest-ranking officer on the scene a tyrant or an overbearing bumbler. This is just as tiresome as single combat. OK, we can’t all create a character with the depth of Capt. Queeg in The Caine Mutiny, but there are too many CO’s like the vicious colonel in Avatar or the incompetent lieutenant in Aliens who are the way they are and that’s just it. In real life, most of these guys would offer you aspirin if you needed it, not threats.
Obviously, there are writers who really work on getting the flavor of the military right, and thanks everyone for the recommendations. When I was younger, I read a lot of Heinlein. I won’t go near him now, but Heinlein had been in the Navy and his space navy officers act as if they’re part of a larger institution with its own way of doing things. I can’t say the same for Michener’s Tales of the South Pacific. Forester’s The Last Nine Days of the Bismarck must’ve been one of the first postwar books to look at the invisible-to-civilians forces arrayed behind the scenes, not just the obvious units on the battlefield.
The key to writing about war, with the writers I’ve read, often seems to be to concentrate on the grunt’s eye view: The Naked and the Dead, All Quiet on the Western Front, The Red Badge of Courage. The film Dunkirk, to my mind, is the ultimate example. (Apocalypse Now, a film so powerful that I can only watch it once every 20 years, exists in its own universe.) I enjoyed Denys Rayner’s novel The Enemy Below. The 1957 film of The Enemy Below is, frankly, awful; the best thing in it is the tin can. Same deal with the 1956 film The Battle of the River Plate. It felt like a sea battle, and you have to love the aging ships as they strut their last hour upon the stage. Unfortunately for the audience, there’s more to the movie than a few broadsides.
Two novels that have been recommended to me are Nicholas Monsarrat’s The Cruel Sea and Joe Haldeman’s Forever War. Perhaps others can comment on them. Thanks for this thought-provoking post.
I've read both, although it's been a while. I'm not a huge fan of Forever War, although I think it captures something about the era (Vietnam), perhaps unintentionally. But it's very grunt-level, focusing more on the "chaos and absurdity" than the "machine roughly designed to win wars". I enjoyed Cruel Sea, and as best I can recall, it gets this right. (Not particularly surprising, as it's based on Monsarrat's wartime service.)
Monsarrat's non-fiction memoir Three Corvettes is also thoroughly worth seeking out if you're not already familiar with it
Monsarrat's non-fiction memoir Three Corvettes is also thoroughly worth seeking out if you're not already familiar with it