It’s All about the Armor
Over the past year I’ve read several military sci-fi novels including: Starship Troopers, The Forever War, Old Man’s War (my favorite among all of these listed), and A Hymn Before Battle. I also finished Dan Simmons’ Hyperion at the beginning of the year. Hyperion is an amazing novel has a lot of parts that are very military sci-fiesque. I know this may not be a large enough sampling of military sci-fi to come to any concrete conclusions, but across these five novels I’ve noted an essential element that appears in all of them: The Armor.
The armor was such an important part of Heinlein’s Starship Troopers that when they made the book into a movie and left out the armor it changed the story drastically. Later when they produced Starship Troopers 3 last year, they finally placed the battle armor into story, but it was truly just a minor player at the end of this movie. Among the books I read the one that best developed the complete sense of a soldier’s dependence on the battle armor was A Hymn Before Battle. This was John Ringo’s first novel and the first in a series of books about human’s battling technologically superior alien races. Other “friendly” alien races help arm earth and prepare us for the greatest war we’ve ever fought. Yeah, I haven’t read any of the other books in this series yet. Still he does a damn fine job of describing the battle armor. Since this was the first full military science fiction novel I had read, I didn’t know that Ringo was only building upon some of the true titans of science fiction such as Joe Haldeman and Robert A Heinlein. As a matter of fact I completely read the novels in the reverse order of how I should have read them. I started with the newer novels first. If anybody is just getting started with military science fiction, they should absolutely start with Starship Troopers first. If you’ve seen the movie then don’t worry, it will only ruin about a fourth of the novel (they’re very different stories).
But back to the armor. If science fiction is an accurate predictor of our military’s future then a soldier’s battle armor will be the life blood of our military in the world to come. The armor will be able to house a soldier for weeks and weeks providing the soldier with fresh air and food in all sorts of hostel alien environments. The armor will completely recycle the soldier’s waste (hey, now that’s what I call “green” battle armor). The armor will be the soldier’s drop ship onto a planet’s surface and then his or her mode of transportation around the planet. The armor will also be the soldier’s targeting computer that rarely misses and be the soldier’s personal medic when needed. I could go on and on, but I think you get the point by now.
This finally leads me to the next Legion of Lethargic Super-Geeks novel review that will occur in March of 2010. We’re reading Armor by John Steakley. This is another military sci-fi novel that probably isn’t going to change my conclusions about the importance of battle armor to our military in the far flung future.
Next week, I’m going to discuss podcast novelists who have hit the big time by taking their stories to the next level. Getting their novels published by major presses.