Everybody was in a different war. Nobody’s war is quite the same as anyone else’s.”
There’s time for at least one more review before the end of the year, and this one’s a doozy. B Cubed Press, the same publisher who brought us Alternative Apocalypse has now released Alternative War, 26 works of fiction (mostly) with just about every flavor of war you can imagine, shown from the point of view of the soldiers, commanders, unarmed bystanders, and all the people left behind when their loved ones marched into battle.
As Elizabeth Anne Scarborough says in the Foreword, “Perhaps some of them will provide some insight into why we keep repeating what simply seems like a really bad idea.”
Quite a few of these entries are poems, short but powerful pieces that effectively convey how one aspect of war feels: the verses pounding like drum beats, or gunfire, or a long slow slide of despair. Jane Yolen’s “Alpha/Omega” starts with a quote from Moby Dick and moves on to the mourning of soldiers turned into weapons aimed by the person in charge. “A Comprehensible Escape” by J.J. Steinfeld shows animosity in a suburb, but I’m not sure if it’s about the past coloring the present, or the past giving permission to express the ways we already don’t like each other in the here and now. And “The Southern Lady” by Marge Simon is a nightmare of the helpless rage of the ones dealing with the fallout from war, the destruction and death and complete inability to fix the damage or even convey to the conquerors how this is their fault.
With death, there should be dignity. Yet there is none here as the men in dusty blue uniforms continue to pass through our front lawns.
Maybe I wasn’t paying attention before, but the book Circe was the first time I ran into the idea that maybe Ulysses WASN’T the greatest father. The poem “The Song of Telemakhos” by Peter Tacy posits that leaving your family behind for war and endless travels and then coming home and slaughtering every one of the most eligible bachelors on the island was a pretty rotten choice. But it’s hard to steer a new path when the story was never about you.
“Musings of a Tower Jockey” by Bruce Golden features the heartbreakingly mundane thoughts of one lonely gunner in a tower. “Rags of Peace” by Vlora Konushevci is a song of refugees and determination, carrying the scraps of one’s heritage and hope, saving them for the day they can be shared in celebration. “Valor” by Gwyndyn T. Alexander is utterly bleak, showing how the victors see a different war from the defeated; the ones on the ground know the real cost in lives and suffering and people’s stories wiped out of history. “We know the truth of heroes.” And both “…The Mother of All Bombs” by Lita Kurth and Ann Poore “Reaping the Iron Harvest, Again…” are anti-celebrations of the wholesale death and destruction of total war.
In fertile ground we plant our sons,
In the bloody rain they flourish.
But before they’re grown,
They are scythed down,
For the iron harvest.
Now for the short stories. Jim Wright’s fascinating sci-fi story “The Gelding” shows a possible end result of our “smart” technology. A single robot, cut off from the rest of the robots responsible for destroying the human race, now has to try to keep the last few humans alive. The story hints at a symbiotic relationships, not just between creators and creations, but between enemies, suggesting that opposing sides in a war need each other to keep the war – and civilization itself – moving forward.
Artillery shook the ground and the hum of shrapnel split the air as showers of dirt fell like rain. It cared not where it landed, in the lifeless blue eyes of the sergeant lying beside him, in the bloody wounds of his comrades, in the open sockets of the German corpse staring up from the bottom of the shell hole, or anywhere in the open grave that was No-Man’s Land.
C.B. Claywell’s “No Man’s Land” demonstrates in in minute details the real meaning of the phrase “war is hell”: mud that’s equal parts dirt and blood, the air alive with barbed wire and bullets, everyone around you dying. And if all of that wasn’t bad enough, there’s either something supernatural going on, or we’re just seeing what it feels like to the person trapped inside the giant suicide mission that made up most of World War I.
Not all casualties happen on the battlefield. Both “A Stranger’s Absolution” by Al Margrave and Liam Hogan’s “Remembrance Day” deal with the trauma of those soldiers who come home from war and then have to keep fighting it for the rest of their lives. Margrave’s story is wistful, tragic, full of the regrets that family and loved ones have when the returning hero decides they can’t fight anymore. “Rememberance Day” is more down-to-earth and science-fiction at the same time, featuring a novel idea for dealing with PTSD, or any other mental problem suffered by military personnel who have to do the unthinkable in battle.
Like everyone else, his memory stops at the start of basic training and continues the day he returned home.
There are not one, but two stories of wartime photographers being asked to tell the stories of the dead. “Snapshots of Aleppo” by Pedro Iniguez is dreamlike, and hallucinatory, a man being asked by ghosts to show people what really happens when life is cut short by war, to take the power back from the old men who make decisions that other people pay for. And in D. Thomas Minton’s “Portraits from the Shadow” Nguy ễ n Hi ể u Trung is searching for the ghost of his father, someone who was only one of thousands of people killed in Vietnam. He finds help from an American photographer who answered the same call to tell the story of the people killed, but who his father was and how his father died is something I honestly hadn’t expected.
Carrying on with theme of “those left behind”, Adrianne in Alison McBain’s “Basic Training” is fighting a war of her own, one of unsent letters and seeing her girlfriend in the faces of strangers, trying to get past the feeling that the woman she loves with all her heart is “abandoning” her by enlisting.
Several of these stories included sacrifices taken to try to prevent a war from starting up again, like Tom Howard’s oddly heartwarming story of a grandfather and his adorable granddaughter “The Changeling”. Meanwhile “War Zone” by David Gerrold doesn’t even have a war, not really. I thought at first that this was a daydream, a “wouldn’t it be nice” fantasy about having a competent leader who skillfully uses diplomacy and cunning to stop a war before it can even start. But it turns into something more sinister about the inevitability of conflict, about how governing is sometimes just trying to scrape together a scenario where the fewest number of people die.
“The Mirror Fields” by Rob Francis is a frightening world with a government that uses patriotism as cover for slavery and a whole generation of children being raised to spend their lives polishing the dust from fields of solar panels. But it’s also a first person account of coming of age in war, a love story with no ending.
Two of the stories were much more traditional adventure tales. Philip Brian Hall’s “AWOL” feels like a snippet of a larger story, a day-in-the-life of ne’er-do-well, smart-aleck Jackie Carnegie, left behind in enemy territory after she overslept, learning to care enough to join the resistance. By comparison “The High Road” by Gustavo Bondoni has a more serious tone, a story of will and innovation, less about the war and more about how a country torn apart is putting themselves back together again, even while so many people are warring with each other they’ve long since stopped caring about the damage done to the region they’re fighting over.
“Cusco got bombed. Badly.”
“I heard. Do you know who did it?”
Pablo shrugged. “The Chinese. The Americans. The Russians. The Brazilians. Who knows? All of them were fighting.”
“Burden of Command” by Karl El-Koura is another one that feels like it should be part of a larger story. B Company, left behind on an outpost in another reality, is having to fact the fact that no one’s coming to relive them, and their commander has to make a choice when there are literally no good outcomes. And the story with the most abrupt ending and possibly the darkest tone is James Hancock’s “Intruder”, with an act of revenge that takes place long after the war is over. Does revenge even matter if it happens when the target is a brutal man who has lived a long life and isn’t even sorry for any of it?
Last up are my three favorites in the collection. “The Tree of Fate and Wishes” by Anthea Sharp is definitely the loveliest story, and one of the few that has any real hope. A Celtic fairytale told in a sing-song style with the standard grouping of three: three wishes, three offerings, three sacrifices, three attempts to do something to stop the approaching war before it takes everything important away.
One did not go lightly to the wishing tree.
But go she must, for the specter of war panted at her shoulder – a wolfhound, fierce and insatiable, sharp teeth hungry for her father’s blood.
Adding a much lighter tone is Shawn Kobb’s “Welcome to Home Drone”, done in one of my favorite styles: the cheery automated emails, where you only see half of the conversation. The reader is left to imagine the hapless consumer’s reaction to the rapid escalation in both the jingoistic language and the technology being flung at the “enemy” (rival company). Lots of hastily-invented ™-branded merchandise and corporate buzzwords and collateral damage.
“Disgusted that the legal system of your nation has failed you in your God-given right to expedient home delivery?”
“Lanterne Rouge” by Jeremy Thackray is based on a real event, and a fitting way to close out the collection. This is the imagined story of the man who came in last in a cycling race held to celebrate the end of the first world war. It’s a brutal race that the man starts out with no hope of winning, and at each stage he’s haunted with dreamlike visions of the spirit of France, and the eternal Champion, and other archetypes all wanting him to admit why he’s doing this. This story laughs at the idea of easy answers, but I felt like there was a tiny glimmer of hope in the idea that answers are not, and never really have been, the point of being human.