Elizabeth Moon is a former member of the Marine Corps who has made a name for herself with both military-oriented fantasy and science fiction. Her worlds combine gritty realism and striking wit; no one else currently working in the field has a similar voice.

The Sten novels from the team of Allan Cole and Chris Bunch combine military affairs and political intrigue. The team-unfortunately no longer working together-had a striking mix of talents, Bunch having served as a member of a long-range reconnaissance patrol in Vietnam and Cole being the son of a prominent CIA official. Their hero, named for a British submachine gun of World War II vintage, is every bit as deadly as his prototype, and much less likely to go to pieces in action.

Technothrillers are vulnerable to events in the world around them. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, truly world-shattering ones became much harder to write; indeed, the entire genre suffered something of a collapse. However pleasant a much-reduced likelihood of armageddon may be for the world at large, it's not far from hell for those who made a living with stories about such catastrophes.

Military science fiction seems less vulnerable to events in the world around it. Technothrillers, by their very nature, are limited to the near future, while military science fiction can and does span all of space and time. If the near future looks peaceful, there's always the further future to explore-either that or a twisted past in which things went differently from the way they turned out in real history.

One area where written military science fiction differs from what vast audiences see on the silver screen is that it demands more from those who pursue it.