Since so much of what follows is anti-militaristic, especially if one puts together the criticisms of Gabriel and Savage (1978), Fussell (1989), Franklin (1993) and Gibson (1994) – all of them, except the last-named, by the way, veterans, and the first three combat veterans – I would like to make clear that in my youth I actually volunteered for the British Territorial Army (which was liable to call-up for foreign service). If the UK had succumbed to appeals to take part in the Vietnam War I might have become a ‘grunt’ like Joe Haldeman – he is exactly three months older than I am.

What all the authors just mentioned are trying to say, though, in different but interlocking ways, is that the modern Anglo-American population is seriously psychologically unprepared for a world that is not growing less threatening. That is also what the sf authors I discuss are getting at. One may well disagree with their suggestions for toughening the population up – franchise restricted to veterans, says Heinlein, form private armies and militias, says Pournelle – but in that case other suggestions would be welcome. One which has some attraction is the creation of a rule which says no politician may commit troops to active service without either serving or having served himself or herself, or else committing a close family member to frontline duties. Totally civilian War Cabinets are a new phenomenon in British life, and not a welcome one; White House think-tanks could do with a dose of bootson- the-ground as well.

However all that may be, this piece was written for the festschrift produced for I.F. Clarke, who has done so much to show the roots of early sf, especially Wells, in the Victorian sub-genre of ‘England Invaded’ novels. The drive of those novels was, of course, to create military and again psychological preparedness for what the authors saw (quite correctly) as a future of terrible danger, something which they projected from a threatening past on to a present of general complacency and unwarranted self-confidence. Mutatis mutandis, the modern American authors discussed here (and further in Seed 2012) are doing the same thing as their British Victorian predecessors, one hopes with more success and less reason for fear.