A FUNNY THING HAPPENED ON THE WAY TO THE MARTIAN FRONT
Introduction
by Hank Davis
“War is hell,” as one general put it. “It is well that war is so terrible, otherwise we should grow too fond of it,” another general observed. All very true, but listen to war stories of veterans sometime, and most of them will be about the ridiculous, absurd, incredible things that happened to them. The funny things. (I’ve got a few of those myself, but I’ll spare you.)
War, like other grim parts of life, is often funny, though it might be “you had to be there” funny. It’d be too easy to trot out the old cliché about laughing to keep from crying, even though that’s often the case, but a lot of things that go on in military life, including peacetime military life, are just plain hilarious. And often memorable.
I’ve often heard about veterans saying of their time in uniform that they wouldn’t go through that again for a million dollars—but they wouldn’t take a million dollars for it, either. If it happened that somebody (or some thing) could offer this veteran a million dollars for it and take it away, even paying inflated 2015 dollars, I’d probably say, “Sold!” (Hmmm, there might be an SF or fantasy story idea there—an alien or supernatural entity buying up the war experiences of veterans. For nefarious purposes, of course. But I digress . . .)
Humor in time of war has a long history. Jane Austen, in Pride and Prejudice, has bushels of humor, starting with the novel’s first line, and has also lots of soldiers—officers, of course—on the scene (“officers enough . . . to disappoint all the young ladies in the country”). If she mentioned that England is in danger of being invaded by Napoleon, I don’t recall it, but that is the larger situation. The only physical violence is a passing mention of a private being flogged. How politically incorrect of her to write of gala balls, romantic misunderstandings, and matrimony when there’s a war on, with people dying (think of the children!).
Movies have been seeing the humorous side of war for a long time; for example, Buster Keaton’s silent movie The General, and, with the advent of sound, the Marx Brothers’ Duck Soup. Some people consider that demented side-splitter an “anti-war” movie, though I don’t recall anyone arguing that Horse Feathers is an anti-football movie, or A Night at the Opera is an anti-opera movie. Later on, Bob Hope was Caught in the Draft, Henry Fonda, on stage and on film, played Mr. Roberts (which, unlike the book, did not reveal how to easily make a new song of “Jingle Bells”). Stalag 17 was set in a German POW camp, but had comic episodes, and a teleplay called No Time for Sergeants became a hit on Broadway, then a movie, also making a star of Andy Griffith. A decade later, Paddy Chayefsky’s The Education of Emily made sport of D-Day, and Blake Edwards’ What Did You Do in the War, Daddy? went for pure farce. In between, Dr. Strangelove blew up the world for laughs. (Probably few remember now that many movie critics at the time were not amused.)
Getting back to books, Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 not only has been selling and selling for over half a century, it plunked a catchphrase indelibly into the language. (Incidentally, when a part of the novel was published earlier in a paperback original anthology that I once saw, the title had a different number than “22,” though I don’t now remember what it was.) And M.A.S.H. went from novel to movie to TV show, running far longer than the Korean War it supposedly was about.
As for science fiction, Harry Harrison wrote a Catch-22-like novel, titled “The Starsloggers” when a short version appeared in Galaxy, and later published in book form as Bill, the Galactic Hero. A bit later came Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five, or the Children’s Crusade (which I read while in Vietnam, incidentally), which undeniably is science fiction, no matter how much Mr. Vonnegut denied being an SF writer. And then there’s humorous military SF at shorter lengths . . .
Which brings me to Jim Baen and Baen Books. Jim had been making waves for some time by publishing military science fiction by David Drake, Jerry Pournelle, and others, first at Ace Books, then at Tor Books, and finally at his own company, Baen Books (you did notice the name on the spine of this book, surely). In the years after the Vietnam war/conflict/fiasco/whatever, anything to do with war was infra dig to all right-thinking decent people. Congress rewarded veterans, most of whom had been drafted, by doing away with the G.I. Bill (and later a Carter administration spokesman lied on network TV, claiming that it was still around, but that’s a whole ’nother rant . . . and when present-day politicians claim that they “support the troops,” don’t believe ’em!). Anyone who suggested that war might continue into the future was obviously part of the problem and not part of the solution, and many book reviewers and book editors had an attack of the vapors like Victorian maidens at the thought of science fiction involving war and the military. They saw no distinction between militaristic SF, which glorifies war and bloodshed, and military SF which treats military themes seriously, examines the character of soldiers, both professionals and draftees, and realistically portrays combat. Only an idiot would think that David Drake’s stories glorify war. Alas, unlike more essential resources, we have never been in danger of idiots being in short supply. For example, in the late 1980s (before I was working for Baen), at a meeting of a New York SF club I heard one sometime editor talking about Baen Books making “money from murder.”
Unfortunately for all the fainting maidens and posturing twits, military science fiction sold well, no matter how many sneering self-righteous remarks about “the pornography of violence” were made, and it became a strong subgenre of science fiction. If it was upsetting the ranks of the perpetually offended in the process, Jim Baen didn’t mind, since he enjoyed shaking people up.
Which might have been why in the late 1990s, Jim asked me to make up a list of military science fiction stories with gallows humor, sometimes called “black humor,” for a possible anthology. He might have been thinking of shaking up a different bunch of people, but he’s no longer with us and I can’t ask him. Whatever he intended, I could only think of a few military SF stories with gallows humor, though I could think of plenty of SF stories which involved the military and were humorous, so I compiled a list of those. At the time, Jim was preparing to move Baen Books from New York to North Carolina, and the anthology didn’t happen—until now.
Humor, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder (and maybe also the ear of the behearer), so I won’t be surprised if some readers think some of the stories herein aren’t really funny, but you can’t please everybody. Some might even argue that some of the stories aren’t really military SF. In any case, and ignoring the one I wrote, I think all of the stories in this book are humorous, some gently and some laugh out loud uproarious. And yes, there’s some gallows humor, but I’ll leave the reader to decide which ones fit that description (see previous remark about the beholder). And many of the writers represented here wore a uniform at one time and knew whereof they wrote.
Mind, not all of the stories which might have been included are here. Arthur C. Clarke wrote a classic called “Superiority,” but that one is available in another Baen anthology, Citizens, still available in paper and pixel versions. Then there’s Ray Bradbury’s “The Concrete Mixer” in The Illustrated Man, Howard Fast’s “Cato the Martian,” Harry Harrison’s “Captain Honario Harpplayer, R.N.”, many Eric Frank Russell stories, more stories by William Tenn and Christopher Anvil . . . stop me before I anthologize again.
In the meantime, I hope you’ll enjoy this anthology. And I hope this is as close as the readers get to actual war, though I’ll take no bets on that.
—Hank Davis
May 28, 2015