{"id":30027,"date":"2016-11-02T01:00:19","date_gmt":"2016-11-02T05:00:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=30027"},"modified":"2018-09-18T14:12:53","modified_gmt":"2018-09-18T18:12:53","slug":"qotd-pournelle-versus-bujold","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2016\/11\/02\/qotd-pournelle-versus-bujold\/","title":{"rendered":"QotD: Pournelle versus Bujold"},"content":{"rendered":"

[In Jerry Pournelle’s books,] Falkenberg\u2019s men are paragons compared to the soldiers in David Drake\u2019s military fiction. In the Hammer\u2019s Slammers<\/em> books and elsewhere we get violence with no politico-ethical nuances attached to it all. \u201cCarnography\u201d is the word for this stuff, pure-quill violence porn that goes straight for the thalamus. There\u2019s boatloads of it out there, too; the Starfist sequence by Sherman and Cragg is a recent example. Jim Baen sells a lot of it (and, thankfully, uses the profits to subsidize reprinting the Golden Age midlist).<\/p>\n

The best-written military SF, on the other hand, tends to be more like Heinlein\u2019s \u2014 the fact that it addresses ethical questions about organized violence (and tries to come up with answers one might actually be more willing to live with than Pournelle\u2019s quasi-fascism or Drake\u2019s brutal anomie<\/em>) is part of its appeal. Often (as in Heinlein\u2019s Space Cadet<\/em> or the early volumes in Lois Bujold\u2019s superb Miles Vorkosigan novels) such stories include elements of bildungsroman<\/em>.<\/p>\n

[…] Bujold winds up making the same point in a subtler way; the temptations of power and arrogance are a constant, soul-draining strain on Miles\u2019s father Aral, and Miles eventually destroys his own career through one of those temptations<\/p>\n

Heinlein, a U.S naval officer who loved the military and seems to have always remembered his time at Annapolis as the best years of his life, fully understood that the highest duty of a soldier may be not merely to give his life but to reject all the claims of military culture and loyalty. His elegiac “The Long Watch” makes this point very clear. You\u2019ll seek an equivalent in vain anywhere in Pournelle or Drake or their many imitators \u2014 but consider Bujold\u2019s The Vor Game<\/em>, in which Miles\u2019s resistance to General Metzov\u2019s orders for a massacre is the pivotal moment at which he becomes a man.<\/p>\n

Bujold\u2019s point is stronger because, unlike Ezra Dahlquist in “The Long Watch” or the citizen-soldiers in Starship Troopers<\/em>, Miles is not a civilian serving a hitch. He is the Emperor\u2019s cousin, a member of a military caste; his place in Barrayaran society is defined by the expectations of military service. What gives his moment of decision its power is that in refusing to commit an atrocity, he is not merely risking his life but giving up his dreams.<\/p>\n

Falkenberg and Admiral Lermontov have a dream, too. The difference is that where Ezra Dahlquist and Miles Vorkosigan sacrifice themselves for what they believe, Pournelle\u2019s \u201cheroes\u201d sacrifice others. Miles\u2019s and Dahlquist\u2019s futures are defined by refusal of an order to do evil, Falkenberg\u2019s by the slaughter of untermenschen<\/em>.<\/p>\n

This is a difference that makes a difference.<\/p>\n

Eric S. Raymond, “The Charms and Terrors of Military SF”, Armed and Dangerous<\/em><\/a>, 2002-11-13.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

[In Jerry Pournelle’s books,] Falkenberg\u2019s men are paragons compared to the soldiers in David Drake\u2019s military fiction. In the Hammer\u2019s Slammers books and elsewhere we get violence with no politico-ethical nuances attached to it all. \u201cCarnography\u201d is the word for this stuff, pure-quill violence porn that goes straight for the thalamus. There\u2019s boatloads of it […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[32,28,53,41],"tags":[1235,1023,424,478,85],"class_list":["post-30027","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-media","category-politics","category-quotations","tag-esr","tag-loismcmasterbujold","tag-morality","tag-robertheinlein","tag-sf"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-7Oj","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30027","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=30027"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30027\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":36188,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30027\/revisions\/36188"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=30027"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=30027"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=30027"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}