Mankind has always hated war. And yet, it has always fascinated us, too. As long as we've written, we've written about it. This is quite literally true. The Epic of Gilgamesh goes back to the earliest days of our literacy and is, among other things, the story of warfare. The Iliad, the foundation stone of all Greek literature, centers on the siege of Troy and the great struggle between Akhilleus and Hektor. The Aeneid, Beowulf, the Norse sagas, the Chanson de Roland…all stories of battle, of warriors. And we're still writing fiction about war, in and out of science fiction, to this day.

Why?

For the two cents it's worth, here's my answer. Fiction is about character under stress. What we do when the heat is on reveals far more about us than how we behave in ordinary times. What comes close to putting so much stress on the character, fictional or otherwise, as nearly getting killed? As Samuel Johnson said, "When a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully."

Well, I admit there is one other stress that does the same thing: love. And, of course, what passes between man and woman (or, less often, between man and man or between woman and woman) is the other enduringly popular theme of fiction.

And to this mix science fiction adds a couple of other interesting riffs: gadgetry as interesting as the writer can come up with and, sometimes, alien beings also as interesting as the writer can likewise. The grand-daddy of stories of this type, H. G. Wells's The War of the Worlds, actually saw print in 1898, but since it set the stage for so much that came afterward, I don't see how I can possibly neglect mentioning it here.

Wells was far from the only author interested in the effects of the Industrial Revolution on warfare yet to come. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, there was, in fact, a small boom in what we would now call technothrillers, stories examining near-future wars with emphasis on the newfangled machines that would make it different from anything that had gone before: ancestors of Tom Clancy, one might say.