This chapter is good military sf which Poul Anderson writes very well. Some sf authors write nothing but. It is obviously based on real military conflicts despite being about fighting Naqsans on Mundomar. We see a crowded personnel carrier, pulverized bones, cooked faces, melted eyeballs, children getting in the way of bullets, colonial citizens entertaining their new allies, air combat, loss in action of a man who had got married shortly before leaving Earth, a jungle base, rain roaring on barracks, men huddled near the 3V, a news tape of Christmas, Chanukkah and the Universal Love movement on Earth, an interest in oil in the disputed territory, Naqsan corpses unburied because they cannot infect human beings, the arrival of trained Naqsan pilots, Conway waking in pain in a wrecked flyer in a jungle with no radio, a dialogue with death, a KILLED IN ACTION: list of human names and a MOURN FOR: list of Naqsan names.
Obviously the war on Mundomar, like Gunnar Heim's privateering in the previous volume, could have become a spin-off series.
9 comments:
Never nice at the sharp end.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
And you never flinched from showing us how bad that sharp end is in your books, esp. THE GENERAL and the Draka series, to name two examples.
Ad astra! Sean
There are people who actually enjoy combat. Generally speaking their fellow-soldiers regard them as insane.
The father of a friend of mine was one of them. He volunteered for every raid on enemy lines in the later stages of the Korean War because, as he said when asked about it, "I was bored. I don't like being bored."
He also threw a petty officer overboard, on the ship back to Canada, when the man started rating him about his uniform. It was detected only because someone saw the man falling past an open porthole.
And he killed a dozen Chinese soldiers in a trench raid... with a sharpened entrenching tool.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
And I can't help but wonder if such persons are actually psychopaths, devoid of conscience and empathy for others. The best soldiers seem to be those who do what needs to be done in war because they believe it to be necessary, not because they enjoy it.
Smart psychopaths know how to control themselves so they could function in society. The stupid ones end up dead or in prison.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean: depends on what you mean by "best". For a solitary raid, my friend's father was first-rate. As a team member, not so much. And later he just walked out -- left for work one morning, his wife and kids thought, and never came back.
Not a lot of empathy there, no. I suspect he was emotionally "muted", and needed danger and killing to feel really alive.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
I think I can understand why your friend's father was at his best in solitary raids. But he still strikes me as the kind of person I would be uneasy at being too close to.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean: oh, yeah, understood. He killed easily and without much emotion, if he decided he wanted to.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
Killing is sometimes necessary. But I believe it should only be done from necessity or by command/authorization from legitimate authorities.
Ad astra! Sean
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