Such acts will continue to be necessary as long as men have to fight to defend their homes and lives. And science fiction, with its advanced technology and alien worlds, provides fertile ground for fictional warfare. Thus you can get military science fiction: SF with a military theme, but considerably more sophisticated than space opera. I read a lot of military SF, for roughly the same reasons I like the Hornblower saga: good drama requires conflict, and war is a very good place to find conflicts. Right now, most of my military-SF collection comes from just a few authors.
David Drake is a Vietnam veteran who chose writing as his career after he returned home. His main claim to fame is a collection of extremely high-powered military-SF stories about a regiment of mercenary soldiers called Hammer's Slammers. Unfortunately, you have to be careful when buying the Slammers books because Drake's publisher has a disturbing habit of re-issuing the same book every few years, under the same or a different title, with mostly the same stories and one or two new ones.
HAMMER'S SLAMMERS
Drake, David
c.1987, Baen
ISBN: 0-671-65632-5
Eight short stories about Colonel Alois Hammer and his armored regiment, a very mean bunch of mercenaries in a very mean galaxy. Well-written stories (most of them) and a well-thought-out background give these stories quite a punch. Even better, several of the stories are more than just "military fiction with rayguns" -- for example, the story called "Cultural Conflict" looks at the almost-inevitable disaster that results when first contact with a hostile native sapient is made by a band of soldiers. The best story in the book, "Hangman," looks at the burden of command and how much it can cost a soldier to do his duty -- up to and including the lives of those he swore to protect.
HAMMER'S SLAMMERS: AT ANY PRICE
Drake, David
c.1985, Baen
ISBN: 0-671-55978-8
A collection of three stories: a novella and two shorter pieces. In the title story, the human colony planet Oltenia is in trouble. Intelligent natives, the Molts, are waging a war against the human colonists. The Molts have a couple of advantages that let them fight quite well against the disorganized Oltenian military, and adding Hammer's Slammers to their forces hasn't helped the Oltenians much. Into this disaster comes General Alexander Radescu, the new commander of the Oltenian army. Though he got his position by political connections, he's a true soldier who is determined to end the war with the Molts "by any means necessary" -- and when Radescu says "any means," he means any means, up to and including killing his own commanders when they decide to continue the war because it boosts their power rather than end it in a mutually agreeable peace. And he calls on two renegade Slammers to help him do it. One of the short stories is an account of an "interrogation" by one of the Slammers' machine-interrogation teams. The second story is about a Slammer who gets caught between honor, family loyalty, and duty to his regiment.
HAMMER'S SLAMMERS: ROLLING HOT
Drake, David
c.1989, Baen
ISBN: 0-671-69837-0
To date, this is the only Slammers full-length novel, and it's substantially weaker than any of the short stories. Junebug Ranson, a line officer suffering from combat fatigue, is ordered to take a makeshift group of armored vehicles -- tanks and combat cars -- a thousand kilometers through enemy territory to relieve a besieged friendly city. Her job is made a lot harder by the fact that around half her personnel are also fatigue cases, and the rest are a mixture of new recruits and rear-area personnel with no combat experience. Along for the ride is Dick Suilin, a civilian newsman who wants to get back to the capital city to see if his sister is safe. But there's no room for noncombatants when the Slammers are on the move, so Suilin takes a combat post. Before they reach their target, he's as much a veteran as any of them. This story is cold, brutal, bloody, and pretty effective. But it's also a bit too long and drawn-out. After reading this, I concluded that the Slammers stories work best at shorter lengths.
John Hemry is a recent addition to the military-SF scene. So far he's written two SF trilogies, each orbiting around a different main character. One is the Stark series. I have all three of these, but I've only read the first one:
STARK'S WAR
c.2000, Ace Books
ISBN: 0-441-00715-5
A weird sort of story set in a near-future scenario. The USA dominates Earth's resources so completely that other countries got together and colonized the Moon, hoping to grab its mineral resources for themselves. John Stark is a senior sergeant in the US Army, assigned to a strike force sent to conquer the "enemy" lunar colonies. The initial invasion is almost bloodless, but following operations quickly become a stalemate. Reinforcements sent from Earth prove to be led by officers who raise incompetence to an art form. A badly planned attack on the enemy lines becomes a bloody slaughter, and Stark has no choice but to watch his comrades be slaughtered .. or to lead them in a mass mutiny against the stupid officers who put them there.STARK'S COMMAND
c.2001, Ace Books
ISBN: 0-441-00822-4
STARK'S CRUSADE
c.2002, Ace
ISBN: 0-441-00915-8
Hemry's second trilogy stars -- of all incredible, impossible ideas -- a military lawyer. I only have the first one of these:
A JUST DETERMINATION
c.2003, Ace Books
ISBN: 0-441-01052-0
Would you believe a military-SF novel with a lawyer as the protagonist? I wouldn't have -- until Hemry did it with this book. Paul Sinclair is a wet-behind-the-ears ensign with a bit of legal training, which gets him assigned as the Legal Officer for his new ship, the USS Michaelson. Much of the story is rather mundane "new guy finding his place" kind of stuff, but then it turns more serious. An interstellar incident results in the unnecessary destruction of another starship. The Captain of the Michaelson is court-martialed for negligence. Sinclair was on the bridge when the incident occurred and was involved in the events that led up to it. Hemry then follows Sinclair through his part in the trial, which is shown with respectable legal accuracy. Sinclair himself has to decide how he's going to deal with the incident, the charges against Captain Wakefield, and his own emotions about what happened. He ends by making a surprising choice: to testify in defense of a captain he doesn't like, doesn't respect, and believes acted wrongly, because he also believes there's a higher principle at stake.
