Vigilancia ambiental y de la salud de los trabajadores

Military SF developed – went through its emergent phase – during what has been called the Golden Age of Science Fiction, traditionally accepted as occurring between 1938 and the 1950s.76 According to historian Edward James the year 1938 was important to SF because this was

73 _{Rieder, pp. 141-142, 97.}

74 _{American Exceptionalism is the idea that the United States has a unique history, a unique}

mission to transform the world, and a unique position of superiority over other nations. It has long been the ideological underpinning of – and justification for – the American empire and all of its military adventures. Related, manifest destiny was a term coined in 1845 to justify the annexation of Texas, Oregon, and California, and, simply defined, meant that God had willed the continental expansion of the United States. It later came to mean the unique virtue of the American people and their institutions, and the mission and destiny to spread these institutions to the rest of the world.

75 _{Greg Grewell, ‘Colonizing the Universe: Science Fictions Then, Now, and in the (Imagined)}

Future’, Rocky Mountain Review of Language and Literature, Vol. 55, No. 2 (2001), pp. 25-47 (p. 28).

76 _{Although some scholars argue that the Golden Age ended with, or not long after, World War Two}

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when some of the great writers of modern American sf began to appear, when new ideas about what sf actually should be began to emerge, when new motifs and ideas which were to dominate sf for a long time began to be explored in detail, when standards of writing began to improve, when the level of scientific accuracy increased, and when John W. Campbell, Jr., became a long-time editor of Astounding.77

Adam Roberts offers a ‘thumbnail definition’ of the Golden Age as the period when the genre was dominated by the sorts of stories that appeared in Campbell’s

Astounding between the late-1930s and the 1950s: ‘idea-fictions’ rooted in recognisable science with heroes ‘solving problems and overcoming enemies, ‘expansionist humano-centric (and often phallo-centric) narratives’, and ‘extrapolations of possible technologies and their social and human impacts.’78

Campbell sought to appeal directly to ‘a mature and sophisticated readership and as such determined that the stories he published would be similarly adult.’79 _{All of}

these elements of ‘idea-fictions’ were often incorporated into ‘military’ plotlines as the subgenre developed. Campbell – who harboured some blatantly authoritarian and racist views, which he was not shy about – had a heavy influence on the attitudes of what would become military SF.80 _{Likewise, his preference for stories}

in which human beings proved themselves superior to other intelligences – what Paul A. Carter has called a ‘projection out upon the universe of Campbell’s own American superiority complex’ – both continued attitudes already visible in 1930s space opera, and encouraged those attitudes in 1940s proto-military SF and 1950s military SF.81 Campbell’s human chauvinism influenced the presentation of aliens

Anatomy of Wonder, 5th _{edition, ed. by Neil Barron (Westport, CT, and London: Libraries Unlimited,}

2004). pp. 45-58 (p. 46).

77 _{James, p. 55.}

78 _{Adam Roberts, The History of Science Fiction (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan,}

2007), p. 195. Gary Westfahl, on the other hand, argues that Campbell did not create the Golden Age; ‘rather, he noticed it, responded to it, and helped it along.’ Gary Westfahl, The Mechanics of Wonder: The Creation of the Idea of Science Fiction (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1998), p. 256.

79 _{Mike Ashley, The Time Machines: The Story of the Science-Fiction Pulp Magazines from the}

Beginning to 1950 (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2000), p. 108.

80 _{Two infamous editorials in Astounding, reprinted in Jerry Pournelle’s Imperial Stars (1986),}

layout his beliefs. First, ‘Constitution for Utopia’ (May 1961), in which he outlined his ‘pragmatic’ belief that only the wealthy should be able to vote. Second, ‘Race Riots’ (January 1965; later renamed ‘The Barbarians Within’), in which he attributed violence to genetics and declared ‘barbarian’ as a genetic type, following the Civil Rights riots. Jerry Pournelle (ed.), Imperial Stars, Volume 1: The Stars at War (Riverdale, NY: Baen Books, 1986).

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in SF well into the 1960s. Finally, this possibly contributed to the continuing Manichaean structure of conflict – the dualistic opposition of good and evil, light and dark, white and black – in proto-military SF.

The historical-cultural context of this period also contributed to the proto-military SF portrayal of conflict. In his book In The Shadow of War, an assessment of the militarization of society and what it meant to the polity and the culture, Michael S. Sherry uses the term ‘Age of Militarization’ for the historical process the U.S. entered in the 1930s, by which ‘war and national security became the consuming anxieties and provided the memories, models, and metaphors that shaped broad areas of national life.’ He recognises that the term is a creative oversimplification, that militarization ‘did not define or cause everything that happened’ but simply ‘loomed large and persistently enough to give unity to a half-century of history.’82

He also examines the ‘peculiar currents of American militarization’, dominated as it was by civilian elites and their values: compared to the ‘atavistic kind’ of militarism supposedly displayed by the Japanese and the ‘regimented, totalitarian version’ demonstrated by the Germans, America’s technological virtuosity (even ‘technological fanaticism’) in warfare ‘did not seem like militarism at all.’83

Also an important effect of the historical-cultural context was the rebirth of the American superiority complex as a result of World War Two: the ‘good war’, often understood to be the least morally ambiguous war of the twentieth-century, in which the U.S. and its allies triumphed over German Nazism, Italian fascism, and Japanese militarism – establishing the nation as a superpower whose actions would help determine the fate of the rest of the world. For the U.S., the decades following the World War Two were ‘prolific breeders of myth’: the great military victories of the war, scientific-technological developments, unparalleled prosperity at home, and the new position of world leadership, ‘bred a national euphoria, even hubris in some, capable of the boast that America could do anything.’ Among these myths was the old one about national invincibility and national innocence, the idea that Americans ‘won their wars – all of them, so they believed – and fought them all for righteous

82 _{Michael S. Sherry, In the Shadow of War: The United States Since the 1930s (New Haven and}

London: Yale University Press, 1995), pp. x-xi.

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purposes.’84 _{This was mirrored in military SF, even as, according to Brooks Landon,}

other parts of the SF field displayed ‘questioning and frequently apocalyptic pessimism’ in the years following World War Two and Hiroshima.85 Likewise, the Manichaean structure was also a result of World War Two and the start of the Cold War. The established hero/villain – Democracy and Totalitarianism, followed by West and East – structure prevalent in the geo-political order informed a similar ‘us versus them’ structure in narratives. The Other remained important in science fiction and American foreign policy.

Proto-Military SF Texts

The works examined from the late-1940s and 1950s are fashioned with a realism when dealing with military themes, and an understanding of the military environment and military personnel, missing from the earlier generation of space opera. This includes a better understanding of military hierarchy and discipline, of the way the military and combat changes a person, of tactics and strategy, as well as logistics, appropriations, and military bureaucracy, and of the military-civilian divide and relations between the services and the public. According to David Drake, the 1940s brought military SF stories ‘which focused on how battles were fought, what sort of men became soldiers… and how soldiers interacted with civilian society’; he attributed this to World War Two.86 _{In addition, unlike earlier space}

opera and future war stories, the proto-military SF narratives of this period display the two streams – militarism and antimilitarism – that characterise military SF. From its inception military SF contained the ‘two souls or stances’ Darko Suvin identifies within American science fiction, which can roughly be demarcated between ‘militaristic’ and ‘non-militaristic.’ The first stance is that

mass slaughter, with all weapons available and regardless of the military-civilian divide, and a concomitant militarization of society are

84 _{James T. Patterson, Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945-1974 (The Oxford History of}

the United States, Volume X) (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), pp. xvii, 8.

85 _{Brooks Landon, Science Fiction after 1900: From the Steam Man to the Stars (New York:}

Routledge, 2002), pp. xiii-xiv.

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inevitable for the salvation of the commonwealth and should therefore be encouraged in a spread between sad necessity and cynical glee.

The second stance, at the other extreme, is that ‘while dangers and lures of mass warfare and militarism are real and have deep systemic roots, they ought to be resisted in all possible ways’ before the commonwealth is lost anyway, or ‘corrupted into something not worth saving.’87

Interestingly, one of the conclusions of I. F. Clarke’s study is that in the post-World War Two nuclear age ‘the tale of future warfare has little attraction for the imagination, since fiction cannot say more than is already known about the terror of the hydrogen bomb.’88 _{This declaration is obviously erroneous, as evidenced by}

the quantity and popularity of military SF during the late-twentieth and early-twenty first centuries, but may suggest one reason why military SF has displaced or incorporated the older future war story. Military SF can jump the speculative hurdles presented by Cold War issues around nuclear proliferation, superpower rivalry, and atomic war.89 In regards to what this thesis considers military SF, furthermore, Clarke is largely dismissive of the literature. He writes that the further future war narratives move away from the ‘traditional task of immediate admonition and earnest warning, the less they have to do with the most probable shape of future war’ and that ‘there is no place left for them in the world we know.’ The ‘tales of interplanetary warfare’, with their ‘modern jargon of blaster guns, power field, atomic weapons, and space-ships’ employ the ‘martial language of a future that has no more than an occasional and allegorical connection with the conditions of our times.’ He is contemptuous of these stories because, as he sees it, ‘the old tale of future warfare becomes a ritual game in which it cannot possibly matter to the reader how many millions are snuffed out’, in which ‘the realities of our world – nuclear weapons, the Cold War, the cauldron of the Near East – dissolve into

87 _{Darko Suvin, ‘Of Starship Troopers and Refuseniks: War and Militarism in U.S. Science Fiction,}

Part 1 (1945-1974: Fordism)’, in New Boundaries in Political Science Fiction, ed. by Donald M. Hassler and Clyde Wilcox (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina, 2008), pp. 115-144 (p. 122).

88 _{Clarke, p. 78.}

89 _{Paul Brians, Nuclear Holocausts: Atomic War in Fiction, 1895-1984 (Kent, OH, and London: The}

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reassuring patterns of a new age of discovery’, and in which wars are ‘so distant in time that they have no menace in them’, providing ‘tales of the heart’s desire.’90

Notable militaristic proto-military SF from this period include works by Henry Kuttner and C.L Moore (Catherine Lucile Moore), Robert Heinlein, Keith Bennett, Malcolm Jameson, H. Beam Piper, and Andre Norton. Kuttner and Moore’s ‘Clash by Night’ (Astounding, March1943) is a moody story of the Free Companies, the mercenaries of the feuding undersea Keeps on Venus in the twenty-fifth century. The novella focuses on Brian Scott, a so-called ‘Free Companion’ who is a warrior for one of the competing undersea civilizations of Venus, and what he intends to be his last mercenary battle.91 Heinlein’s Space Cadet (1948) is his second juvenile novel, and became the basis for the first modern science fiction television serial,

Tom Corbett: Space Cadet.92 The story describes the gruelling process by which Matt Dobson – and other young men from all parts of the solar system – are forged into officers of the Interplanetary Patrol of the Solar Federation; a process that includes tests of endurance, loyalty, self-discipline, courage, intelligence, and integrity, dramatizing ‘a personal ethic and pervasive social Darwinism’, displaying how and why ‘fit’ types survive while the ‘unfit’ are discharged from service.93

Bennett wrote ‘The Rocketeers Have Shaggy Ears’ (Planet Stories, 1950); it is what David Drake calls the only exceptional military SF story by a (probable) combat veteran before Joe Haldeman, Jerry Pournelle and Drake started writing in the late 1960s.94 The short story follows a military patrol – the thirty survivors of a crashed ship, including the viewpoint character, Lieutenant Hague – marching back to base through the unexplored jungles of Venus, engaging native animals and people. Jameson’s Bullard of the Space Patrol (1951) collects seven works of the popular series of ‘Bullard’ stories which Jameson, who had served as an officer in the U.S. Navy, wrote for Astounding between 1940 and his death in 1945. These stories –

90 _{Clarke, p. 196.}

91 _{‘Clash by Night’ and ‘Fury’ (Astounding, May-July 1947) make up the Keeps Sequence.} 92 _{H. Bruce Franklin, Robert A. Heinlein: America as Science Fiction (New York and Oxford:}

Oxford University Press, 1980), p. 14. The same year also saw the broadcast of Space Patrol (1950- 1955), depicting the thirtieth century adventures of Commander Buzz Corry and Cadet Happy Osborn of the United Planets Space Patrol.

93 _{Franklin, Robert A. Heinlein, pp. 76-77.}

94 _{It is the only SF story with the by-line Keith Bennett, but three stories over the period 1951-1963}

were credited to K.W. Bennett, who may be the same man. Bennett was a junior officer in the U.S. Army fighting in the Pacific, as speculated by Drake. David Drake, personal correspondence (email), 24 November 2015.

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beginning with ‘Admiral’s Inspection’ (April 1940, Astounding) – carry John Bullard of the Tellurian Space Force from his Lieutenancy on the Pollux, as captain of numerous warships during the conflict between the Earth Empire and its former colonies of Jupiter and Mars and later the war between the Federation of Interior Planets and the Jovian Empire, to the position of Grand Admiral in the Bureau of Spatial Strategy. Piper’s Uller Uprising (1952), originally a short novel published as part of the very first shared-world anthology, is set on a remote world whose inhabitants – used as mercenaries and labourers on the hell-planet Niflheim – are rebelling against domination by Earth. Norton wrote Star Guard (1955) – discussed in Chapter Seven of this thesis – which has a plot that anticipates those of later military SF fiction: ‘A group of mercenaries is hired to intercede in a conflict on a colony world, only to discover that they are caught in a trap, betrayed by their employers, and are on their own against both sides.’95

Other works from this period displaying a militarist sentiment range from light- hearted and minor short stories like ‘Captain Brink of the Space Marines’ (Amazing Stories, November 1932) by Bob Olsen and ‘Stepsons of Mars’ (Astounding, April 1940) by Ivar Towers (pseudonym for Cyril Kornbluth and Richard Wilson), to more significant narratives by Theodore R. Cogswell and Cordwainer Smith. Cogswell – who served as a volunteer ambulance driver in the Spanish Republican Army, 1937-1938, and a statistical control officer in the U.S. Army Air Force, 1942- 1945 – wrote ‘The Specter General’ (Astounding, June 1952), which depicts a forgotten planetary outpost where a detachment of Imperial space marines, their empire having declined and then collapsed, keeps up appearances even as they forget how to use or repair their high-technology equipment. Smith (pseudonym for Paul Lineberger) – who worked in Army Intelligence and helped found the Office of War Information – wrote ‘The Game of Rat and Dragon’ (Galaxy Science Fiction, October 1955), in which cats serve military duty as ‘partners’ to human astrogators in a unique space war against invisible, insanity-inducing Dragons.

This period also included significant examples of antimilitaristic proto-military SF from Paul Carter, C.M Kornbluth and Judith Merril, Fritz Leiber, Philip K. Dick, and Harlan Ellison. In Carter’s ‘The Last Objective’ (Astounding, August 1946),

95 _{Don D’Ammassa, Encyclopedia of Science Fiction: The Essential Guide to the Lives and Works}

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written while he was in the U.S. Navy, two elderly officers, aboard one of the subterranean battlecruisers waging a generation-long nuclear war, choose to be blown up with the atomic bomb their ship carries after realising the futility of the war. The Asian enemy, evidently feeling similarly, has committed mass suicide by releasing a biological weapon which will destroy all life on Earth. Kornbluth and Merril (under the alias Cyril Judd) wrote ‘Gunner Cade’ (Astounding, March-May 1952), which takes place in a ‘regimented militaristic future’ and depicts how Cade, an ‘indoctrinated mercenary soldier’ for a totalitarian regime, is forced to think and act for himself and learn about the true nature of his world.96 Leiber’s ‘The Foxholes of Mars’ (Thrilling Wonder Stories, June 1952) ‘documents war’s psychotic effect upon one man’ and the coming about of a ‘galactic Hitler out of the rage of warfare.’97 Dick’s ‘The Defenders’ (Galaxy Science Fiction, January 1953) and ‘Second Variety’ (Space Science Fiction, May 1953) are both antimilitarist stories about automated warfare; the former optimistic and satirically presenting technology as a saviour, the latter pessimistic and depicting technology as a metaphor for the inevitability of war. In ‘The Defenders’ people have lived underground for eight years and left the atomic war to be conducted by automatic machinery, and they find that their robotic servants have decided that the war is pointless, and faked the progress of the war, focusing their efforts on the restoration and maintenance of the planet ‘until such time as the human race shall have purged itself of its war madness and become fit to emerge and live in harmony.’98 _In

‘Second Variety’, on the other hand, the self-replicating and autonomous weaponry, the ‘claws’, continue the war after the United States-Soviet Union nuclear exchange, and have begun to evolve into new forms – from the basic ‘churning sphere of blades and metal’ into ones that appear human – and are infiltrating both the Soviet and American lines.99 Ellison’s ‘Soldier’ (Fantastic Universe, October 1957) is the story of a soldier fighting in Great War VII, who is struck by a radioactive beam

96 _{Mike Ashley, Transformations: The Story of the Science-Fiction Magazines from 1950 to 1970}

(Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2005), p. 19.

97 _{‘Introduction’, The War Book, ed. by James Sallis (London: Panther Books, 1971), p. 14. Suvin,}

pp. 115-144. (p. 123).

98 _{Philip K. Dick, ‘The Defenders’, Battlefields Beyond Tomorrow: Science Fiction War Stories, ed.}