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What the Well-Dressed
Future Warrior Will Wear

Hank Davis


I suspect that armor started out as clothing. Clothes could actually be thought of as armor against cold air and chilly, wet things falling from the sky, even against the cold, hard ground to sleep on. The sort of stuff to make an early European wonder why his ancestors ever left Africa.

Once someone decided that he needed that bearskin more than the previous occupant did, and was wrapped inside it, the next time he had a disagreement with a neighbor, leading to throwing rocks (it was the Stone Age, after all), the bearskin wearer might notice that a rock impacting on the bear skin didn’t hurt as much as one landing on bare skin, giving an extra added attraction to wearing the borrowed pelt.

(Do I deserve a point or two for not making puns about “bare skin” and “bear skin?” No? Or invoking an animal’s pelt, and being pelted with stones? No slack, eh? I see I have a tough audience.)

Of course, once that neighbor, or another more inventive one, realized that bear skins, or maybe a lot of skins taken from smaller, less contentious animals, made a defense against a hurtling rock, perhaps the result was a neolithic arms race, possibly with such stages as:

1. Try throwing the rock harder.

2. Add a second layer of bear skin, or even a third.

3. Invent the sling.

4. Try tying rocks together to go outside of the bearskin(s),

or fight rocks with rocks . . . 

5. Invent the pointed stick . . . 

6. Try tying a pointed rock to the stick . . . 

And I think I’ll sideline this thought experiment before we get to arrows, catapults, etc., on the offensive side, along with learning how to smelt metals (no puns on “smelt,” please note) and putting metal plates in place of those bearskins, and so on. For one thing, we’re leaping over centuries, if not millennia in a single bound and I don’t have a big red “S” on my shirt. Nor a lightning bolt.

Besides, I’m doing off-the-wall speculating here, without benefit of evidence, research, or expertise. At least it’s definite that eventually metal suits came along, getting so heavy that specially bred horses were needed to carry their wearers into battle, said battle being fought with swords and lances, which is to say, higher-tech descendants of the pointed stick.

(Of course, those knights in supposedly shining armor also used shields, but I think that shields may have originated back in Africa, invented by those with the sense not to leave the balmy climate.)

Then somebody had to go and invent gunpowder . . . Later-day warriors do have some armor, of course, such as bulletproof vests worn by police, the flak vests and steel helmets worn by twentieth-century soldiers, etc. But firearms have had the upper hand for a long time. Maybe it’s time for the pendulum to swing back. Suppose the armored warrior makes a comeback, encased in suits composed of all the latest advances in metallurgy, and maybe even plastics harder than steel. Put all sorts of electronics inside, too. Add a video screen in the helmet so the suit’s wearer can see if someone is coming up behind him. Build all the modern weapons into the suit. Make it like wearing a tank, but much smaller and more nimble.

It would still be heavy of course, probably even heavier than a medieval suit of armor. But if powerful miniaturized motors are also built into the suit, then the warrior’s own muscles are not the only things doing the lifting, walking, and even jumping. And maybe add booster rockets in case the soldier needs to jump from the top of one building to the top of another, for a better angle to launch a barrage of mini-missiles.

We’re in science fiction territory now, and it’s about time, too.

I’m not sure who first suggested such futuristic armor, either in speculative fact or fiction. Robert A. Heinlein’s Starship Troopers was a landmark, of course, but George H. Smith’s short story, “The Last Crusade,” which happens to be included in the pages which follow, was published in the magazine If in 1955, four years before the Heinlein novel was serialized in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction in 1959 under the title “Starship Soldier” (Heinlein’s preferred title, incidentally). Nonetheless, Heinlein’s novel, in spite of, or because of being very controversial at the time, which didn’t prevent it from winning a Hugo Award for best novel of the year, firmly established the powered armor concept in the minds of science fiction readers and writers, possibly including Stan Lee of Marvel Comics, who introduced Iron Man a few years later, but certainly in the case of Joe Haldeman, who published his novelette, “Hero” (also included in the pages which follow), in 1973 in Analog, making brilliant use of the powered armor concept. “Hero” was the first of a series of stories which eventually became the novel, The Forever War, and the book won the Hugo and Nebula Awards.

I can’t read the minds of authors (particularly authors no longer with us—where did I put that Ouija board?), but there are a number of stories which I suspect would not exist in a parallel universe lacking the examples of the Heinlein and Haldeman novels. And David Afsharirad and I have recruited a platoon of the best such future troopers in this book.

I hope I’ve made it clear how indebted this book is to the Heinlein and Haldeman novels, but there’s an intervening ancestor: Body Armor 2000, a 1986 anthology edited by Joe Haldeman (that guy does get around), Martin Harry Greenberg, and Charles G. Waugh, and published by Ace Books. The connection began when intrepid science fiction reader Michael Figueroa wrote to Baen editor Tony Daniel, praising the book and suggesting that Baen reprint it. Tony passed the request on to publisher Toni Weisskopf, who liked the idea and turned it over to David Afsharirad and yr. humble but crotchety editor. The latter quality went into gear when I noted that the book had three very good stories, by David Drake, Robert Sheckley, and Gordon R. Dickson,that I nonetheless preferred not to reprint because I had already reprinted them in previous Baen anthologies (for example, the David Drake story was in Worst Contact). Another crotchet was that after reading the stories in the Ace anthology (listening to them, actually—I’m legally blind), I thought some of the stories didn’t actually fit the theme and preferred not to reprint those.

And, with great regret, C.J. Cherryh’s “The Scapegoat” was a novella, and would have made the book too long.

But we have carried over from the 1986 anthology veteran stories by Joe Haldeman (where have I heard that name before?), Harry Harrison, George H. Smith, and Larry S. Todd, and we’ve added new recruits to the powered armor platoon with Christopher Ruocchio, Allen M. Steele, Quincey J. Allen, Karin Lowachee, and more. Readers who already have the Ace anthology on their bookshelves will find much that is new here, not to mention stories well worth rereading. And readers who come to these stories for the first time will definitely get their money’s worth. We’ve tried for a wide range of viewpoints. While I (Hank) don’t subscribe to the currently fashionable notion that all war is futile, readers with that mental bent will find stories exemplifying it here. Readers looking for heroism in combat will find that here, as well. Your editors (even the crotchety one) hope you’ll enjoy the book, and also hope that these stories are as close as our readers come to actual war, futuristically attired or not. We don’t want to lose any customers.

—Hank Davis

March 2024


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