Fighting the Future War: An Anthology of Science Fiction War Stories, 1914–1945. FredericKrome, Editor. New York: Routledge, 2012.

Abstract

Fighting Future War: An Anthology of Science Fiction War Stories, 1914-1945 Frederic Krome, Editor. New York: Routledge, 2012.According to Frederic Krome, fiction is more accurately viewed as a reflector of present than a predictor of future. In other words, its narrative creations mirror hopes, fears and aspirations of time during which it was written. As such, says Krome, fiction ought to interest historians.His contribution to historical record is this anthology of short stories and editorials (published from start of First World War to end of Second World) that imagine what future war would be like. Primarily these writings focus on Earthbound (not interplanetary) conflicts, and all but one appeared in pulp magazines that specialized in fiction. This thematic reader explores an era when pulps flourished and science-fiction genre was finding its way. That way began with Hugo Gernsback.Krome provides half a dozen of Gernsback's rarely reprinted editorials and one short story from The Electrical Experimenter magazine. Although his cliched fiction is yawningly gadget-driven, his editorials are surprisingly lively. Gernsback says he is passionately intent on firing some experimenter's imagination to work in a new direction (30). To that end, he proposes wonderfully creative and pragmatic inventions like trench destroyers, long-distance electro-shock guns, and microphone buoys-machines that will bring wars to a quicker conclusion.Gernsback's tutelage (he controlled most influential pulp magazines up to 1929 Crash) fostered programmatic authors whose unsubtle, big-brained heroes defied slow-witted bureaucrats to save Americans from potentially disastrous attacks by unprincipled foreign nations. In one of his later editorials, Gernsback suggested that the ideal pro-portion of a scientifiction [his earlier term for genre he would later rename fiction] story should be seventyfive per cent literature interwoven with twenty-five per cent science (113). But stories he wrote and many of those he edited seem to reverse that proportion.So what is an anthology to do when so many future-war stories are almost subliterary? Krome takes courageous path less chosen. He deliberately avoids limiting his anthology to canonical literature only; he happily includes short stories that have lain unread because of pedestrian style, plotting and characters. The result for readers is double-edged: we have joy of discovering old-fashioned ripping yarns, but also onus of slogging through some leaden prose. …