They say you can’t go home again, and as usual, they’re wrong.
In re-reading these two tales of the Star Watch some thirty years after I wrote them, all of the passions and motivations that went into the two novels came flooding back into my mind. I was pleasantly surprised to see how well the stories hold up, but struck by a deep sense of sadness to realize that the underlying human problems that form the focus of the novels are not only still with us, but are worse today than they were three decades agoStar Watchman was my second novel, and I wrote it at a time when France was deeply enmeshed in colonial wars in Algeria and a place that was then known as IndoChina. French Indo-China, at that. Today we call that region Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam.
The problems of colonial wars, and wars by proxy— where major powers fight “minor” wars in some Third World country—were uppermost in my mind as I wrote Star Watchman. Shortly after the novel was first published. 1964, President Lyndon B. Johnson started the immense American military build-up in Vietnam. Six years later President Richard M. Nixon enlarged the war into Laos and Cambodia. Some fifty thousand young Americans were killed in the fighting.
All through the Vietnam years I kept wondering if I was crazy or if the people running our government were. Before undertaking Star Watchman I did a fair amount of research into the history of colonial wars in general (including our own Revolution) and of Algeria and southeast Asia in particular. I began to ask myself, as the Vietnam fighting dragged on year after year: Even if we win, even if Ho Chin Minh surrenders abjectly, what would we gain? I mean, if I could understand that this war was fruitless, why couldn’t the men in the White House?
Those of us who love science fiction can’t help feeling that, if the-politicians and other leaders of society would read SF, maybe we wouldn’t stumble into the quagmires that we seem to find with depressing regularity. I don’t think that if LBJ or Nixon had read Star Watchman either one of them would have changed his policies. But maybe it would have made them at least mink a little about what they were doing and where they were heading.
Incidentally, I have not touched a word of either novel. By today’s standards, they are not politically correct. Women are called girls, as they were in the Sixties. It’s certainly a male chauvinist society out there on the space frontier. If anyone’s sensibilities are offended by the implicit attitudes in these novels, they can always go back and re-read Jane Austen.
The Dueling Machine stemmed from an entirely different source. I was working at a high-powered research laboratory in the Boston area in the early Sixties. In those days I was a pretty good fencer; even won the New England saber championship one year (novice class). I helped to organize a fencing club at the lab. On summer venings we practiced outdoors, on the parking lot. Often our practice was interrupted by the screech of automobile wheels, as drivers passing our lot stared at a bunch of people merrily trying to stab one another, and forgot to watch where they were driving.
Myron Lewis was one of the lab’s physicists, and became a good saber fencer. One day, as we were complaining about lawyers (yes, lawyers were not held in high repute even then), I grumbled that Massachusetts had made a mistake when it outlawed dueling. Myron quickly suggested that it would be great if somebody could invent a dueling machine: a device in which two people could fight each other to the death, without being physically harmed,
We had invented Virtual Reality, although neither of us had the sense to pursue the idea except in fiction, and the term would not be coined for another twentysome years-
I had earlier written a short story, “The Next Logical Step,” that John Campbell published in Analog, in May 1962. It dealt with a computer system for playing war games, in which the player experienced—with all his senses—the battle being fought. Myron and I combined that idea with his to create the dueling machine. We plotted out a novelet, which I wrote. It was the cover story in Analog’s May 1963 issue, with a superb cover illustration. That was during the brief era when Analog was published in large format, rather than dijgfcst-size.
That novelet became the first third of the novel. The Dueling Machine, under the sub-tide “ The Perfect Warrior.”
The theme of The Dueling Machine is once again about war, and how to avoid or prevent itIt is a thinlydisguised speculation on what would have happened in the late 1930s if doughty Winston Churchill had been Prime Minister of Britain rather than the pacifistic Neville Chamberlain. Was World War II inevitable? I do not believe any event in human history was inevitable.
Which is one reason why we read science fiction, I think. By looking forward into the possible futures that we may face, we can begin to make decisions about which of those futures we would like to live in, and perhaps even take steps to help that future to come about. The future is no more inevitable than the past. It is created by what we do in the present—and what we fail to do.
So, here are two tales of the future from thirty years ago. I think they stil! have things to say to today’s readers, and I fondly hope that they are as entertaining now as they were when they were first written.
Ben Bova Naples, Florida