After the interesting We all died at Breakaway Station and the quite dreadful Come, hunt an Earthman, volume 3 of the Venture SF series is Hammer’s Slammers by David Drake. It is actually a collection of linked short stories, despite Venture’s blurb bravely proclaiming ‘no short stories, no fantasy, no boredom’. It is a solid example of military SF, with a well-balanced mix of human story, weapon pornography and military tactics that will keep its core constituency happy — as it must have, because many more ‘Slammers’ books followed, and in fact this was very much the launching pad of Drake’s very successful career.
The book shows the waste and the casual and collateral destruction of lives that fighting causes. It shows the loyalty and toughness of fighting men and women, and in doing so obliquely advertises the military life as one of a kind of virtue. For the better, it avoids the higher-level, dehumanised oversight level of story and instead puts the reader in tanks (‘blowers’ — massive, hovering, nuclear-powered monsters) and in commandeered dwellings, waiting for said tanks to pass by.
Hammer’s mercenaries take the money, do the job, and go, leaving destruction and death behind them. They try to make no judgement on whether they are on the ‘right’ side of the conflict, though sometimes they find themselves asking too many questions. They are on the side that pays them. Thus, we have a sort of foregrounded decency (individual grunts doing the best they can in tough spots, too busy staying alive to worry about rights and wrongs — though some of them do — kind of thing), against a background of venality. In desperate situations people can be brave, tough, brutal, resourceful and so on, yes; but often those situations need not exist. Often, the mercenaries are pure parasites — taking the money from a government funded by the taxes paid by the struggling workers, destroying livelihoods in the fighting, and then leaving.
Yet the machinery of war is shiny and brilliant and sleek and seductive.
Anyway, I feel like I am thinking about it too much. It’s a military SF adventure. If you like that sort of thing, you’ll like the book.
DSPACE 