NB: It was very silly of me to think I could write this piece briefly. My delay in posting is a reflection of just how much there was to write on this theme, even though I barely scratched the surface with respect to all the work that belongs here. I’ll set more sensible goals next week.
I owe one of my most formative reading experiences to an author whose views I would later find abhorrent. The latter part of that statement is a common enough affair in the world of literature (and an important lesson in never putting anyone on a pedestal, least of all an author), but the former is what matters here.
Decades after reading Ender’s Game (1985), I still cannot decide if it’s a “war” novel or an “antiwar” novel—probably because it’s a novel that highlights the absurdity of trying to impose a strict divide between the two categories at all.
Ender’s Game follows a child sent to military training camp in a world bracing for the arrival of an alien threat. There, as on Earth, he’s mercilessly bullied, and achieves excellence in combat simulations, leading to his placement in progressively more challenging contexts. Only—brace yourself for the spoiler—the last simulation is not a game. Without realizing it, Ender has been placed in charge of the whole human fleet, and strikes a blow that wipes out the approaching species.
Genocide.
(Or, xenocide.)
Now, the argument for this book being an “antiwar” novel (as I first read it, as a child) lies with Ender’s reaction to this discovery, his full recognition of the crime he’d committed, and the steps he takes to atone for the atrocity. I was convinced that this had to be an antiwar novel, because how else could one read the ending?
Except that the ending can also fit perfectly within a pro-war narrative: one in which one does what needs doing in the moment, and also spends the rest of their life trying to make peace with the harm one did because one “had” to.
This is a common approach taken by many veterans: war was necessary, they don’t regret doing it, and they will mourn forever-after all the harm that their war has done.
There’s a reason, then, that Ender’s Game enjoyed a place for years on the U.S. Marine Corps reading list (along with Robert Heinlein’s Starship Troopers, which we’re not going to get into today but will address on another occasion): it not only offers a number of touchstones for conversations about war psychology and battle tactics conducive to an officer’s training; it also creates an exculpatory playing field for all the violence that one might do in service to one’s country/people.
Ender, after all, had no choice about the circumstances of his birth, and everything he does in the program is crafted as necessity—sometimes by the fictive adults in control of his education; at all times, by the author behind the scenes. Even the war is developed with strict binaries: us or them. The whole universe has been crafted to imagine a scenario in which war—even genocide—however terrible, gains an excuse.
This is a common structure in military fiction and other entertainment media, where the idea that “war is hell” is often strongly tethered to an elevation of everyone who braves that “hell” on our behalf—and also, to a fetishistic fixation on specific ways in which war is hell. Thus, even work overtly striving to convey antiwar themes often inadvertently creates an alluring “proving ground” for individual strength and bravery, and a playing field for titillating violence.
Yes, yes, war is awful, horrible, the worst… and also, ah… can you tell me one more vivid, grotesque, sensational story about just how awful it is? As a deterrent, of course!
This is why the director François Truffaut is said to have declared, “There is no such thing as an antiwar film,” and why TV writers talk about the Do Not Do the Cool Thing trope, which plagues their attempts to tell stories that might deter people from other actions and specific substances, too.
99% Invisible had a recent story about how this backfired in the creation of a cartoon character trying to teach children not to touch toxic chemicals: Mr. Yuk even led to an uptick in children’s engagement with harmful substances. Steven Spielberg’s The Fabelmans makes a similar point, when a boy’s love of cinema is first piqued by trying to process a violent train collision he sees on screen, which he tries to replicate at home. We are often drawn to the study of disruptions, and will go well out of our way to emulate what we’ve seen, all the better to understand it.
Suffice it to say, it is incredibly difficult to depict an unwanted behaviour in a way that won’t still make it seem desirable to some.
But even though this is a challenge across the board, sci-fi has an added hurdle when trying to depict war and some of its most important ideological weapons, propaganda and nationalist fervour, with anything approaching a truly “antiwar” character.
This is because science fiction routinely depicts species as monocultural entities clashing across galaxies, and gets away with grafting only fragments of real-world politics onto its elaborate, far-flung future settings. This means that sci-fi can absolutely create a staging ground for potent philosophical questions—but then, readers and viewers might wrongly treat this staging ground as a direct and effective analogy for the world as it actually is, and come to simplistic conclusions about it.
The result is that this genre—my genre—has a tall order before it, in trying to depict war, nationalism, and propaganda effectively.
Today, for paid subscribers, I look at a few ways that the genre has risen (or failed to rise) to this challenge. If a truly “antiwar” story is impossible, what remains as an effectively humanist way to write on these themes in our violence-haunted world?
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