Certainly the normative concept of courage is to act bravely
and heroically while risking injury or death, especially to
protect others; and we often consider the test of courage to
occur in combat of some sort. Most military SF valorizes this
assumption. But as one of our correspondents has pointed out
such matters are complex and debatable, especially as our
killing technology improves.
One author who examines the ambiguities involved in war-induced
courage and whose implications in his stories seem often to
lead us to more humane conceptions of heroism is Lucius
Shepard. Look particularly at his short story "Salvador"
and (less successfully, I think) his novel "Life During Wartime".
I thought I would also include an SF poem that deals with this
subject. For me, its implications (provided as much by its
structure as its language) are chilling:
Five Ways to Kill a Man
There are many cumbersome ways to kill a man:
you can make him carry a plank of wood
to the top of a hill and nail him to it. To do this
properly you require a crowd of people
wearing sandals, a cock that crows, a cloak
to dissect, a sponge, some vinegar and one
man to hammer the nails home.
Or you can take a length of steel,
shaped and chased in a traditional way,
and attempt to pierce the metal cage he wears.
But for this you need white horses,
English trees, men with bows and arrows,
at least two flags, a prince and a
castle to hold your banquet in.
Dispensing with nobility, you may, if the wind
allows, blow gas at him. But then you need
a mile of mud sliced through with ditches,
not to mention black boots, bomb craters,
more mud, a plague of rats, a dozen songs
and some round hats made of steel.
In an age of aeroplanes, you may fly
miles above your victim and dispose of him by
pressing one small switch. All you then
require is an ocean to separate you, two
systems of government, a nation's scientists,
several factories, a psychopath and
land that no one needs for several years.
These are, as I began, cumbersome ways
to kill a man. Simpler, direct, and much more neat
is to see that he is living somewhere in the middle
of the twentieth century, and leave him there.
-- Edwin Brock
Well, I suppose we need to update the last lines and suggest
"somewhere near the end/ of the twentieth century, and leave
him there." Still, it does make its point.
rick c.
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