a small talent for war
Jan. 16th, 2012 04:46 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cmdr_zoomOne of the problems with adapting H.G. Wells' classic The War of the Worlds is that our ability to kill keeps exceeding the Martians'.
We reached parity as far back as the 1940s - practically speaking, a fighting machine is about on par with a Sherman or a Tiger. An armored vehicle with a rapid-loading, direct-fire weapon that can fire on the move: terrifying and unstoppable to an army still fielding horse cavalry and artillery, who've never heard the words "mobile warfare" or "blitzkrieg", let alone "air power", but not so much to those with a few divisions of the same. Within another decade, we'd surpassed them with the city-destroying atomic bomb, requiring the 1953 movie to invent a magic shield to keep the curb-stomping boot on the right appendage. And as any mecha fan knows, things have just gotten bleaker in the intervening decades for anything shaped like a water tower which actually has to follow the laws of physics. A fire team can now kill one of Wells' tripods with man-portable weapons, or paint it with a laser for someone else, or call in a Warthog to do the job proper. So the first challenge for any modern producer is coming up with a believable handwave to make all of that moot. (Magic force fields remain a favorite, with a long enough pedigree that even critical fans will tend to just shrug. Force fields, sure, why not.)
Of course, advances in the biological sciences have kicked the second leg out from under Wells' tidy little moral. It's now known that humans have more in common (and are more likely to exchange diseases) with a head of lettuce than any hypothetical invaders. The days when it was blithely assumed that a space explorer could step down onto an alien world, pluck a weird-colored fruit off a tree and find it both tasty and nutritious (and not immediately go into anaphylactic shock) are far behind us. Which just leaves the third leg, imperialism and how much it sucks to be on the wrong end of it - that, at least, is still going strong.
We reached parity as far back as the 1940s - practically speaking, a fighting machine is about on par with a Sherman or a Tiger. An armored vehicle with a rapid-loading, direct-fire weapon that can fire on the move: terrifying and unstoppable to an army still fielding horse cavalry and artillery, who've never heard the words "mobile warfare" or "blitzkrieg", let alone "air power", but not so much to those with a few divisions of the same. Within another decade, we'd surpassed them with the city-destroying atomic bomb, requiring the 1953 movie to invent a magic shield to keep the curb-stomping boot on the right appendage. And as any mecha fan knows, things have just gotten bleaker in the intervening decades for anything shaped like a water tower which actually has to follow the laws of physics. A fire team can now kill one of Wells' tripods with man-portable weapons, or paint it with a laser for someone else, or call in a Warthog to do the job proper. So the first challenge for any modern producer is coming up with a believable handwave to make all of that moot. (Magic force fields remain a favorite, with a long enough pedigree that even critical fans will tend to just shrug. Force fields, sure, why not.)
Of course, advances in the biological sciences have kicked the second leg out from under Wells' tidy little moral. It's now known that humans have more in common (and are more likely to exchange diseases) with a head of lettuce than any hypothetical invaders. The days when it was blithely assumed that a space explorer could step down onto an alien world, pluck a weird-colored fruit off a tree and find it both tasty and nutritious (and not immediately go into anaphylactic shock) are far behind us. Which just leaves the third leg, imperialism and how much it sucks to be on the wrong end of it - that, at least, is still going strong.
(no subject)
Date: 2012-01-17 11:28 pm (UTC)Enslavement is the only thing I could picture being worthwhile to a hypothetical advanced alien species.
(no subject)
Date: 2012-01-24 11:58 pm (UTC)