Day 95: Space War

I've been thinking about war in space since reading The Forever War. The basic strategy in the novel was to build a planetary base with giant lasers near one of the faster than light collapsars and shoot anything alien that came through it. This is pretty damn scary because it suggests that they can control an entire system with one base and a bunch of lasers. I guess if you can target something from the surface of a planet, then you can probably hit it too. Once the laser gets out of the atmosphere its just going to keep going. Same goes for a missile. In other words, the only way for something to be out of range is if it's out of range of your sensors. One of my favorite quotes of all time actually addresses this idea that no munitions fired in space will ever stop.

“Sir Isaac Newton is the deadliest son of a bitch in space.”

It's just a snippet of a conversation between a sergeant and some ensigns in the game Mass Effect 2, not important to the plot at all, but for some reason it always held my imagination. It really made the game feel like a space game, you know? The sergeant tells the ensigns that 'eyeballing' a target with a space torpedo is an awful idea because the bomb will never, ever stop. That is, until it hits something. If you're lucky, it'll just hit something barren. If you're unlucky though, then somewhere, sometime, you're going to really ruin somebody's day if you miss.

This brings me to something I thought was missing from The Forever War: the leftover devastation. It fits for a soldier's perspective of Vietnam, leaving those bases all over enemy space and never returning, but what happens when an unrecognizable ship from the future goes into one of those systems with a base that can laser you from millions of miles away? The people who tried to rebuild after the Vietnam War on ground that was soaked in agent orange, the victims of landmines left in the ground since WWII, and even direct collateral damage are rarely the kind of allegorical topics we see in space wars, and I wonder why that is. Why do pieces of the exploding Death Star not hurt anybody? Why do the missed shots in those big, chaotic space battles never accidentally impact an ally? To ask the overarching question, why do we imagine future wars where the only costs are the ships and soldiers when all of our modern wars have far reaching consequences? There are often victims that may not have even been aware of the conflict, killed or maimed decades later by leftover munitions lying in wait. Are we ignoring them on purpose?

I guess the answer is pretty obvious. It doesn't make for a very clean plot if Han Solo gets hit by an errant torpedo and explodes. William Mandella just wants to retire to his hetero space colony with his super hot wife and be happy, not worry about what those giant lasers he left in space are up to. People want wars to simply be over. Sometimes they are, but more often I think they are not.

But there are some stories where this isn't left unaddressed, and usually those stories are all about what happens after the war. After the events of Ender's Game, Ender can't live with his decision to wipe out the Formics, and the next novel is about how he helps the last queen rebuild. In the Expanse, the leftover effects of the protomolecule are constantly worried about, so much so that Holden starts to lose his mind over it, haunted by what could happen if he missed any little gram of protomolecule anywhere in the solar system. Recently I read a series by Michael Mammay called Planetside where the war isn't over even after the nukes come down on the alien planet and wipe most of them from existence. These kinds of stories take the wars that happened and turn them into something that make unforeseen ripples through the whole universe, just like wars do to us today. I'm not saying a clean cut war is impossible, or that it necessarily makes for a bad story, but I do show preferential treatment to the war stories that exist in a greater ecosystem. I like stories where the events taking place affect the circle of life because those are the ones that really feel like they mean something to me. In a way, those stories where bullets don't stop flying just because the battle ended are the stories that feel closest to home.

Thank you for reading,

Benjamin Hawley