Tales of War and Futility

Today I set myself the goal of showing you two certain emotions I feel when reading particular passages and books. I want to define and describe those emotions and classify the materials that evoke them. It is not too easy, as all emotions are elusive and become something different when you think hard about them, and furthermore I cannot be sure you feel them in the same way as I do.

Imagine giant nations in an endless war. Imagine mud-filled trenches meandering for hundreds or thousands of miles through desolate landscapes, filled with famished men in field-grey uniforms. Imagine giant and absurd monstrosities of concrete and iron built for killing and for survival. Imagine gun barrels longer than railway cars. Imagine dark and cramped submarines.

Imagine nations pouring millions, tens of millions of lives into the fires of this stalemate. Imagine immense bright laboratories bustling with scientists in white belted lab coats, pince-nezes on their noses or, if they are female, their blonde hair knotted in tight, neat buns, all single-mindedly working day and night to perfect nerve gasses or atomic bombs. Imagine the war never ending.

Images like that never fail to evoke emotions in me, and they might do the same for you. I have encountered them in various books and now I want to distil their essence.

They are images of conflict, and there is something enormous about it. The details may vary greatly and still achieve the same effect. The level of technology can be different, but generally something between 1910 and 1950 works best. The enemy may be just like you, they may be faceless, or they may be never shown. The images may deal with the front, or with other aspects of the war. Even if not a single soldier is shown, it can still work.

The easiest way to encounter these kind of feelings is to read the history books. After all the images I tried to decribe above are basically simplified and exaggerated descriptions of the first and second world wars with a bit of the American civil war strewn in. The horrifying tales of Verdun and of the Somme certainly do evoke comparable feelings.

But there is a problem with that. We like to read horror stories and watch horror movies because in that context we desire to feel the kind of emotions they evoke. We want to feel the thrill and in our case the trill lies in the sheer enormous magnitude of the numbers, the amount of hate, suffering and madness, and of the enormity of the machine. I tried (maybe to no avail) to include that notion in my text above by talking of millions and tens of millions, of monstrosities and of endlessness. It is called the sense of wonder and letting yourself be overwhelmed by it is usually, despite everything, a pleasurable feeling.

This is the problem! It is in principle possible to read true (or at least drawn-from-life) stories of war and atrocities like horror stories, but it is guilty pleasure. And with good reason. We tend to overlook this if the time and place of the story is far from our reality (crusades, Mongols), but the fact is that these things really happened and that they happened to real people. Some are still alive to tell the tales. If you read how 10.000 people were killed in this town, and 20.000 in the next and 25.000 in a third and you remind yourself that all these people, these fates were real, you can only read these stories with appalled dismay. The feeling of enormity remains, but it is not pleasurable any more.

In fact, if we read the stories of real atrocities in this serious manner (which is the only manner in which we should read them) we find that we do not like to read them at all. But if we want to avoid reading about them how much more must we avoid them happening—ever again!

One possible solutions to this dilemma is to take the source of the horror (the Nazis, for example) and put them in a fictional environment (thereby making their victims fictional). Alternative history scenarios do the trick nicely and they are used abundently.

There are quite a few alternate history Nazi novels, for example. I feel that there are issues about them that somewhat transcendend the topic at hand, so I will talk about them some other time. For the moment I will limit myself to mentioning the names of two examples of such novels: The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick and Weaver by Stephen Baxter (there are hundreds more).

But you can also go a step further and sever all links with our world completely. You can take the warring nations in a different reality, a different planet, a different species. This has two advantages.

Firstly, you can ramp up the dimensions to heighten the sense of wonder. I don’t want to harp on about this point, but it is done frequently in stories. It is a somewhat cheap trick, but it sure works.

The other thing is that in the case of a foreign species on a foreign planet the reason for the described conflict is always remote. On this earth we love and hate, but whether on some planet the blues or the greens win does not matter to us (unless the author cheats and pictures one of them as evil and the others as good). In other words, their conflict is meaningless. It is futile and random.

Combined with the size of wonder feeling we are astonished how something that large can be that meaningless, astonished, even enraged over the futility and the stupidity of it.

We may also get these feeling when we consider real wars. In fact, many authors have used scenarios like the one above to make a point about the real world (Iain Banks, for one). It is probably not true for all wars, but with some of them you just cannot help thinking, “Why didn’t they just stop fighting, for god’s sake?”

Finally, I want to list a few examples which evoke these feelings in me and which were the reason of writing this article in the first place.

• The Time Ships by Stephen Baxter has two examples. One is an alternate history where the first world war never ended but was still on in the 1930s. It is hampered a bit by Baxter trying to squeeze in as many ideas of H.G. Wells as possible, but still there are some extremely impressive and chilling scenes there.
  The other one is only a short description. A future civilisation built a Dyson sphere around the sun (a habitable sphere with the radius of Venus’ orbit). On its inner surface of perpetual day, millions of earths in area, thousands of cultures are locked in endless wars. The fact that they are never described in detail or even named, that there are so many of them, that there is a vast abundance of space, and that all is built on an enormous scale heightens the feeling of meaningless to a maximum.
• Iain Banks has used images like that several times. The most prominent one may be the dead planet in Consider Phlebas, where fear of nuclear strikes made a civilization undermine their whole planet with vast tunnels filled with railroad tracks, on which their leaders would stay forever in motion, so that they could not be targeted by the bombs. Banks mentions that despite that the people of that planet were all wiped out eventually by biological warfare.
  It has to be mentioned that Banks’ book are usually full of a sense of futility, even when they are describing pleasant things. In his world of billions of populated planets, of electronic mind infinitely superior to people, of unlimited technological abilities nothing has any meaning any more. His descriptions of holocaust evoke a feeling of futility, but so do his descriptions of parties.
• TV series have done it as well. Star Trek tried several times (for example in the episode A Taste of Armageddon) but did not quite pull it off because of a lack of budget.
  But there is an impressive example in Stargate Atlantis, the episode Poisoning the Well. Here scientists of a planet develop a serum that will make them invulnerable to the alien attackers that devour them. They push on with unbreakable fanaticism, despite the fact it turns out that the serum kills half of their population. Much of the episode’s effect stems from the 1940s imagery of the planet and the fanatic hardness of the characters.