Military science fiction
Some works draw heavy parallels to human history and how a scientific breakthrough or new military doctrine can significantly change how war is fought, the outcome of a battle, and the fortunes of the combatants.
The capital of a galactic empire is sometimes a "core world," such as a planet relatively near a galaxy's centrally-located supermassive black hole, which has advanced considerably in science and technology compared to current human civilization.
Characterizations of these empires can vary wildly from malevolent forces that attack sympathetic victims, to apathetic or amoral bureaucracies, to more reasonable entities focused on social progress.
The long spans of time (e.g., decades or centuries) required for human soldiers to travel interstellar distances, even at relativistic speeds, and the consequences for the characters, is a dilemma examined by authors such as Joe Haldeman and Alastair Reynolds.
Other writers such as Larry Niven have created plausible interplanetary conflict based on human colonization of the asteroid belt and outer planets by means of technologies utilizing the laws of physics as currently understood.
The term "military space opera" may occasionally denote this latter style, as used for example by critic Sylvia Kelso when describing Lois McMaster Bujold's Vorkosigan Saga.
[3] Examples that feature aspects of both military science fiction and space opera include the Battlestar Galactica franchise and Robert A. Heinlein's 1959 novel Starship Troopers.
[10] A "thematic subdivision" of MSF are works where "ex-military protagonists [are] drawing on their battle experience for tough and violent operations in (more or less) civilian life", typically in a law enforcement setting.
[11] Written just after the Prussian victory in the Franco-Prussian War, it describes an invasion of Britain by a German-speaking country in which the Royal Navy is destroyed by a futuristic wonder-weapon ("fatal engines").
[2] The Vietnam War resulted in veterans with combat experience deciding to write science fiction, including Joe Haldeman and David Drake.
[citation needed] The series of anthologies with the group title There Will be War edited by Pournelle and John F. Carr (nine volumes from 1983 through 1990) helped keep the category active, and encouraged new writers to add to it.
[2] A twist was introduced in Harry Turtledove's Worldwar series depicting an alternate history in which WWII is disrupted by extraterrestrials invading Earth in 1942, forcing humans to stop fighting each other and unite against this common enemy.
The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction lists three notable women authors of MSF: Lois McMaster Bujold; Elizabeth Moon (particularly her Familias Regnant stories such as Hunting Party (1993)), and Karen Traviss.
[12]In 1980 and 1981, two science fiction authors inspired President Ronald Reagan's vision for a Strategic Defense Initiative in which satellites would be set up to shoot at nuclear missiles.
[13] "Niven and Pournelle saw an opportunity to shape the great void in their political image, and Reagan viewed space as yet another tool to defend America against the communist superpower...".
[13] After the 9/11 terrorism attacks, a group of sci-fi authors called Sigma, including Pournelle and Niven, advised the "Department of Homeland Security on technological strategies for defeating terrorist threats.
"[14] The French military says the authors are asked to imagine warfare situations that "destabilize us, scare us, blame, or even beat us", in order to provide the army with a "fresh set of practice scenarios".
"[15] The MOD hired Peter Warren Singer and August Cole to write eight short stories about threats from "emerging technologies" including "artificial intelligence (AI), data modeling, drone swarms, quantum computing and human enhancement" in a battlefield context.
