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love in the old days biscuits,picnics,cakes now virtual,mobiles,clones. how wired are we to love and how wired to multi-orgasmic organs? love, these days is a matter of switching codes surfing the wide net and, well, and beeps through our electric dreams.-kirpal singh.
This is the first of (I hope) an intermittent series highlighting books which I feel are undeservedly out-of-print, or unjustifiably neglected. In the October 1997 issue of EH, I mentioned that the collective amnesia of the SF field in general was causing lesser-known authors to disappear from our collective memory. With this column, I hope that enough people out there reading this will be curious enough to check out these books. -- Nigel
I'd thought I'd start off with Zenna Henderson's ``People'' books. Zenna who? Well, she wrote a whole bunch of stories about a group of humanoid aliens, the People, marooned on Earth after their ship crashes. Scattered throughout the planet, they are physically indistinguishable from us but possess various psi powers, including telekinesis and telepathy. The stories focus on the surviving children who have forgotten their extraterrestrial origins. These children are struggling to fit into society as normal humans without arousing too much hatred and attention, while trying to find others like them. Before you throw up your hands and moan that this sounds like yet another plotline from the angst-ridden Uncanny X-men, rest assured that Henderson handles this topic with much more subtlety that the ham-fisted Chris Claremont.
The People stories were published in the 50's and 60's, and honestly, it shows. There is a certain old-fashioned feel about the stories that gives it that particularly retro feel (for example, characters go ``Well I'll be blowed! Well, dang me!''. Seriously). There's also a strong sense of what John Clute calls ``pastoral SF'', a variety of fiction which favourably contrasts a simple way of life with a complex urban life. Regardless of how Zenna Henderson's fiction is classified, what shines through is her deeply humanistic view of people, their lives and their motivations.
The most well-known story of the lot is ``Ararat'', which I'm sure all of you have read at some stage of your life. No, you may not recall the title, but once you read it, the plot will come back to you. It's a story which has been anthologised to death, but justifiably so as it's one of her best. ``Ararat'' opens the first anthology Pilgrimage: The Book of the People, and the other stories (which have a strongly Biblical bent), reveal how individual members of the People come to terms with their powers and how they come to find each other and form a little community. The second book, The People: No Different Flesh, continues the saga of the People and their community and how they finally get a spaceship going to bring them back to their home planet, and their conflict when they realise that Earth is just as much home to them as their home planet which they have never seen.
While the stories are written in a charmingly anachronistic style of speech, the characters are real and well fleshed out (no pun intended). Zenna Henderson has a way of making us care for the characters and what happens to them, which is a lot more that what I can say about certain rather hip hard-SF writers of today. Her science is incidental; the psi-powers merely a story device to explore very human emotions of rejection, acceptance, loneliness and moral choices in life. She doesn't have any dazzling super-science, nor does she spin compelling action-packed tales; no stylistic tricks are performed. At the final analysis, her stories are simple tales of human drama set against a SF background. But what engaging stories they are!
Fortunately, though the two anthologies of People stories are out of print, NESFA press has recently released a omnibus collection of all of Zenna Henderson's People stories, along with 4 stories not found in the original 2 anthologies and 1 unpublished story. Ingathering : The Complete People Stories of Zenna Henderson is generally rather difficult to find here, even in Borders. Last I checked the NESFA website, it was still available, so grab it now while you can!
Contemporary SF routinely uses the aircraft carrier model when depicting space warfare. We will examine the limitations of this approach, as well as propose an alternative.
When creating a space warfare scenario, there are three approaches:
Creating an entirely new system would be best from a creative artistic viewpoint. Better to create than to rehash. But this is also the most difficult. We will have to wait for space battles to happen in real life (most will hope that this never happens) before we can shake off the constraints of our present imaginations. Until then we will have to modify existing combat scenarios and transplant them into space.
The naval model is appealing because in common are vast distances and long mission durations. Unfortunately naval craft are big and clumsy and (except for submarines) live in a two dimensional world.
In contrast, nimble little aircraft fly through three dimensional space. Fighter and fighter-bomber aircraft in particular, with their acrobatics and single occupants and emphasis on one on one dueling, make for dramatic heroics.
But the cramped quarters, low endurance and fragility of aircraft do not measure up well to the vastness of naval operations. That's where aircraft carriers come in. Note one similarity between naval and space uses for aircraft and spaceship carriers. Both combine the endurance and livability of large ships with the maneuverability of the smaller craft that they carry.
But this is not the main reason for carrying aircraft on ships. The main reason is that aircraft are much faster than ships and allow the aircraft carrier to quickly search for and destroy other ships. Aircraft carriers allow navies to use the power of the air, their aircraft acting as virtual guns with a longer and more accurate reach than conventional cannon.
Spaceships on the other hand, operate in only one medium - vacuum. There is therefore less reason for spaceship carriers - since the carriers are in themselves spaceships.
There could still be an advantage in using spaceship carriers - enabling the use of smaller, more maneuverable spaceships for strikes against larger, clumsier spacecraft. But even this advantage evaporates under close scrutiny.
Twentieth century naval battles have shown that in a single medium (surface action only) naval engagement, battleships are the deciding element. Smaller, more nimble destroyers are out gunned and out armoured and can only provide supporting roles such as screening and scouting. Smaller yet are torpedo boats, which are even less effective and are themselves easy prey for the destroyers (originally called ``torpedo boat destroyers'', now shortened to just ``destroyer'').
It is reasonable to predict a similar situation in space warfare, with large spacecraft dominating with their larger weaponry (whatever that might be) and heavier armour. And with smaller but self supporting and self contained destroyer-sized spacecraft performing scouting duties to seek out the enemy. There is no realistic combat role for small single seater space fighters.
Together with carrier borne aircraft, guided missiles are a prime cause of the battleship's demise. A guided missile will have the same range and lethality, no matter what the size of the ship that fired it. Whereas only battleships can support the weight and size of sixteen inch caliber cannon, firing shells a few tons in weight. Leaving destroyers with less powerful five inch guns.
In the guided missile age, battleships still have a trick or two up their sleeve. As the Royal Navy discovered to its cost during the Falklands war, modern aluminium skinned destroyers are fatally vulnerable to even a single strike from a guided missile. An old steel battleship with armour over a foot thick is harder to sink. During the Battle of Leyte Gulf of 1944, the Japanese battleship Musashi absorbed 19 torpedo hits and numerous bombs (each with roughly the same destructive power as the Exocets used in the Falklands) from American carrier aircraft before sinking. Convincing proof of the superiority of aircraft carriers, but also an indication of the astounding survivability of the thick skinned battleships.
With the surface area of a vessel proportional to the square of its dimensions, and its volume proportional to the cube of its dimensions, larger vessels will always be able to afford thicker armour.
Even at the launching end of guided missiles (as opposed to the receiving end), vessel size still affords an advantage. The advantage of capacity. The US navy has been studying designs for an ``arsenal ship'' - nothing more than a lightly manned, large cargo ship stuffed full with guided missiles, providing a large amount of relatively cheap firepower.
In any case, it is by no means assured that guided missiles will be the primary weapon in space. Technologies such as lasers and rail guns could just as easily continue the cannon's tradition of bigger is better.
All this further supports our contention that there is no role for single seat fighters in space warfare.
What about submarines? While it can be argued that submarines represent a third medium of operations (the first two being the surface of the sea for ships and the air for aircraft) this aspect of submarine operations is misleading.
Submarines are more usefully considered as the stealth ships of the sea. Their main characteristic is their near undetectability, not that they operate below conventional ships.
In the single medium of space, any stealth technology would be applicable to all spacecraft, hence making any separate analysis of stealth spaceships unnecessary. This is assuming that the stealth technology has no significant cost, performance or other penalties.
The above assumption is not true for the case of aircraft due to an aircraft's requirement for aerodynamic efficiency, making the design and construction of stealth aircraft difficult, costly and fraught with performance trade offs. This should not be true in the vacuum of space.
Note also that the widely reported high cost of the American B2 stealth bomber need not be typical for all stealth designs. The earlier (and smaller and slightly less stealthy) F-117 stealth fighter (actually a light bomber) was developed and constructed more quickly and at less than one twentieth the cost, by a different company (Lockheed and its famed Skunkworks).
Contemporary SF posits the use of single seat space fighters for purely dramatic reasons. A more realistic approach would be to use a naval surface action (battleships and destroyers) model with the principle elements being large heavily armed and armoured capital ships, not carrier borne single seat fighter-bombers.
SF would benefit from a more diverse exploration of space warfare. The single medium model of space warfare is not without its dramatic and heroic possibilities.
It is interesting that one of the most technically irresponsible SF scenarios - the Star Trek universe - comes close to this approach, with large ships engaging each other directly, without single seat fighters. Unfortunately, they do not implement this in a believable manner, as all their engagements are conducted within visual range. But that's another story.
Note: The Battle of the Coral Sea was fought in 1942 between the Imperial Japanese navy and the US navy. It was the first carrier versus carrier battle in history. The Second World War was the first and only time in which such battles have occurred. There have been no carrier to carrier battles in the half century since the end of that war.
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