Top Tens – History: Top 10 Wars (Special Mention: Revised) (5) First World War

Posted on by

 

Collage of images from the most iconic front of the war – from Wikipedia “Western Front (First World War”) under licence https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/deed.en

 

(5) FIRST WORLD WAR (1914-1918)

 

Before it was known as the First World War, it was the Great War – “the biggest, bloodiest, most expensive, most disruptive, most damaging and most traumatizing war the world had ever seen up to that point”.

It also tends to be seen in almost entirely negative terms, as one of the most unpopular and pointless wars in history, particularly when compared to its successor.

In the words of the Encyclopedia of Fantasy, “both World Wars were tragic, but World War I was remembered as an unmitigated tragedy, a grinding apocalyptic process whose outcome was always foreseeable, even though some of the details (like the USA’s entry into the conflict) might have been unexpected at the time”.

“World War II, on the other hand, has been remembered as a melodrama, full of strange and uncanny ups and downs, with terrifying new weapons galore, feats of derring-do on a daily basis, and protagonists who were not only monsters in real life but also, in fictional terms, highly effective icons of villainy”.

It does not help that the First World War was hailed at one point as “the war to end all wars” – an epithet doomed to fail and be replaced by the jaded cynicism that has seen the international agreement that brought it to an end dubbed as “the peace to end all peace”.

A slur for which, as a Treaty of Versailles fan, I will not stand! Well, perhaps fan is overstating it, but I do think the Treaty of Versailles is unjustly maligned, a topic worthy of its own top ten. To put it simply, the Treaty of Versailles was not that bad – while Germany should have spent a lot more time sucking it up and a lot less time bitching about it.

Much the same goes for the First World War itself, particularly in comparison to the Second World War – albeit the former is not so much unjustly maligned, as it earns much of its claim to futility and pointlessness. And much of that is of course the Western Front, the relentless slogging match that remained largely static despite millions of casualties.

Even that, however, is somewhat unfair to the Western Front, which finally showed some dynamism in 1918, although one might observe that took long enough.

More fundamentally, it is the Western Front that provides the enduring imagery of the war, and for that matter of modern war itself, of total war and trench warfare. Its battles, as costly and futile as they were, still read like a roll call of modern military history – with perhaps Verdun and the Somme as the most definitive. Not to mention much of the definitive technology of modern war had its debut or development in the Western Front – notably tanks and aircraft.

There is also the cultural impact of the Western Front – not least on modern literary fantasy (hence the Encyclopedia of Fantasy entry), notably through J.R.R. Tolkien. Such is the cultural impact that it might be summed up by the title of Paul Fussell’s The Great War and Modern Memory.

And speaking of modern memory, it is the First World War that looms larger in national commemorations honoring the day of its armistice – not to mention, nations such as Australia, for whom their national identity was essentially shaped in battle, even in defeat, during the war at Gallipoli, commemorated by Anzac Day.

The static stalemate of the Western Front obscures the war’s more dynamic nature elsewhere – on the Eastern Front (including the Russian Revolution), in the Balkans, in the Middle East (including the Arab Revolt), at sea, in the air, and my favorite as well as the most impressive military achievement through the entire war, the German guerilla warfare led by von Lettow-Vorbeck in Africa.

Arguably, the Germans fought better in the First World War than they did in the Second, despite succeeding in 1940 where they had failed in 1914 – while the Americans also arguably waged a better war, despite failing to do what they should have done in the peace after the First what they did after the Second. Japan and Italy also chose the better side in the First than in the Second, although that might be attributed more to failures in the interwar years.

But I stand by the First World War being unfairly contrasted with the Second World War – usually in terms of the comparison of casualty rates, with the former seen as pointlessly higher without the greater mobility or movement of the latter to show for it.

Firstly, that is not quite true. In blunt terms, the Western Front was just as static for most of the Second World War – it’s just that the trench was bigger, in the form of the English Channel. And also that the Western allies effectively outsourced their casualties to the Eastern Front, where casualty rates could be very high indeed. Even on the Western front from Normany onwards, casualty rates at the sharp end could also be high enough to compare to the First World War.

And in the air for that matter – it’s ironic that Bomber Harris saw the bombing campaign as a way of avoiding the high casualty rates of the Western Front in the First World War, only for the allies to replicate those rates during the bombing campaign.

Secondly, this comparison belies that, if anything, it was the Second World War that was anomalous, while the First World War was more truly characteristic of twentieth century wars as static wars of attrition – as reflected by my favorite historian, H.P. Willmott, when he quipped, seemingly as a paradox, that WW2 might be regarded as the last war of the nineteenth century and WW1 as the first war of the twentieth century. Partly this is that for a brief shining moment, the technology and technique of offensive mobility won out over defensive firepower, but as Willmott observed, it started swinging back as defensive firepower rebounded from 1942 onwards.

The Encyclopedia of Fantasy continues that “despite the attempts of propagandists on both sides, no wholly evil figure emerges from World War I to occupy the world’s imagination, no one of a viciousness so unmitigated that it seems almost supernatural; Hitler, on the other hand, has all the lineaments of a Dark Lord, and the Reich he hoped to found was a parody of the true Land”.

But it’s the Germans as bad guys – I’m a fan of the Fischer thesis.

 

RATING: 5 STARS*****
S-TIER (GOD TIER)

Top Tens – Film: Top 10 Films

Posted on by

 

Exactly what it says on the tin – my top ten films.

And yes, that’s my master or super top ten list for all films across all genres – action and drama, fantasy and SF, horror, animation, films adapted from comics, and comedy.

And no, despite my feature image being the poster for Citizen Kane, “frequently cited as the greatest film ever made”, it is not in my top ten, although I suppose that fortuitously avoids spoiling any entry that is in my top ten. While I have seen it and acknowledge its innovative technical brilliance, I tend towards the view of the film expressed by Peter Griffin in The Family Guy, albeit I wouldn’t go quite so far as he did. In one of its signature cutaway gags, Peter has been banned from the video stores for taping over their movies. In the case of Citizen Kane, he tapes over it to say “It was his sled from when he was a kid. There, I just saved you two long, b00bless hours”.

It could be worse. It could be Peter Griffin’s opinion of The Godfather – he didn’t care for it, as “it insists upon itself”.

Anyway, here are my Top 10 Films.

 

 

Promotional poster art (fair use)

 

(10) FANTASY & SF: PROJECT HAIL MARY (2026)

 

“Amaze amaze amaze!”

My wildcard tenth place entry for best film of 2026, Project Hail Mary is an “epic science fiction film” based on the 2021 novel by Andy Weir and arguably a spiritual sequel to Weir’s The Martian, only on the much grander scale of saving the world as opposed to one astronaut (although there’s an element of the latter). No, that’s not spoiling it given that desperate last ditch shot in the dark is inherent in the title – and the film establishes its premise early on.

So yes, with the world at stake as well as an interstellar spacecraft as opposed to the interplanetary mission of The Martin, it puts both the epic and the science into epic science fiction – with Ryan Gosling swapping in for Matt Damon’s stranded figure who has to “science the sh!t out of” his scenario. It’s interesting that his character has the same initials, Ryland Grace, with the surname setting up the obvious play on the first line of the prayer – Hail Mary, full of Grace.

However, its epic science fiction plays out at the engaging levels of a twofold detective mystery crossed with a buddy film, which gives the film its most heartfelt and heartwarming moments. The twofold detective mystery is, firstly, the mystery of piercing together his memories after waking aboard an interstellar spacecraft with no memory of how he got there, and secondly the mystery that his interstellar mission has to solve.

As for the buddy film, I won’t spoil it further than the film’s own trailer did, but let’s just say Rocky is amazing.

One of the film’s strengths is its use of practical effects, particularly for the set of its spaceship and for the puppetry of one half of the buddy film.

“A visually dazzling space odyssey that’s carried along effortlessly by the gravitational pull of Ryan Gosling at his most winning, Project Hail Mary is a near-miraculous fusion of smarts and heart.”

 

RATING:

X-TIER (WILD TIER) – BEST OF 2026

 

*

 

 

(9) COMICS: DREDD

(2012…There’s an ellipsis because you know there should have been a sequel or TV series)

 

“I am the Law!”

You also knew this was coming.

My first and true love in comics is not one of the ruling duopoly of comics, DC and Marvel Comics, nor strictly speaking a superhero comic (although its main character is arguably as much of a ‘superhero’ as Batman), nor even an American comic (although it is set there, albeit drastically transformed in the twenty-second century).

It is Judge Dredd, the most iconic character from the British weekly SF anthology comic, 2000 AD, ongoing since it was launched in 1977. Unfortunately, American audiences remain somewhat unfamiliar with (or unresponsive to) Judge Dredd, despite his American setting (albeit futuristic) and despite that he is effectively a quintessential American hero in the same vein as Batman – relying on superior discipline, training, experience, equipment and resources, except as a governmental lawman rather than a vigilante billionaire. They even both effectively remain masked in their public identities, as Dredd never removes his helmet.

Even more unfortunately, the most substantial introduction of American audiences to Judge Dredd was the 1995 film, although fortunately that particular horror is fading with time. This Hollywood travesty was particularly inexcusable, because the essence of Judge Dredd is ultimately very simple – Judge Dredd is a futuristic Dirty Harry in a dystopian (and post-apocalyptic) SF satire. How hard is that, Hollywood?! On second thoughts, this simple formula was probably too much for Hollywood to handle – when they couldn’t even have Dredd keep his helmet on throughout the film.

The 2012 film was much more effective in capturing the elements of the original comic (not least in keeping Dredd’s helmet on throughout the film, with Karl Urban playing Dredd by his chin), but not as effective in capturing an audience – in my opinion and that of a few other people who’ve spoken about it, primarily because its own studio sabotaged it, in effect if not intent.

In its own way, this is as unfortunate as the first film, particularly at a time when comic book movies were in such vogue (and dystopian or post-apocalyptic movies have always been popular) – because if ever a comic deserved its own cinematic or screen adaptation, it’s Dredd, especially when you consider the dreck (or drokk – Judge Dredd slang in-joke alert) that does get adaptations. Perhaps a television adaptation would have been better, as it suits the more episodic nature as well as longer arcs of the storyline.

As for the 2012 film, the plot is pared right down – to the classic storyline of Dredd rooting out criminals or perps from a building, which was essentially the same plot as the introduction of the character in his very first episode of the comic, with the added element similar the film’s near contemporary of The Raid with Dredd being trapped within the building and having to fight his way out. However, the film does have a better antagonist than the comic’s first episode, drug queenpin Ma-Ma played by Lena Headey and written for the film rather than adapted from the comic – and a companion for Dredd with Psi-Judge Anderson, rewritten as Dredd’s rookie for the film.

The pared down plot is perhaps the primary reason why the 2012 film captured the essence of the comic much more effectively than the 1995 film with its convoluted storyline unsuccessfully trying to insert too many elements from the comic for its own good.

 

RATING: 5 STARS*****

S-TIER (GOD TIER – OR IS THAT DREDD-TIER? JUDGE-TIER? GRUD-TIER?)

 

 

 

(8) ANIMATION: TOY STORY

(1995-2010: TOY STORY 1-3 and beyond?)

 

“To infinity and beyond!”

The flagship of Pixar Animation Studios and of course my top ten animated films, Toy Story was the first computer animated film (and therefore an extraordinarily influential part of what TV Tropes labels the Renaissance Age of Animation). It also was the flagship of the Toy Story franchise, with two film sequels that maintain the quality of the original (although Stark’s Law of Sequels still gives first place to the original) – I particularly like the interpretation that the third Toy Story film is about the afterlife, with a metaphorical representation of every major version of the afterlife in Western popular culture.

Toy Story itself, both film and franchise, needs little introduction – a story about toys that come to life when their owners are not around. The film introduces us to a group of toys belonging to a boy named Andy, led by Andy’s favorite toy – Woody, a classic cowboy doll with a pull-string vocalizer. (“Reach for the sky!”). Unfortunately for Woody, Andy acquires a new favorite for his birthday – in the form of Buzz Lightyear of Star Command. To complicate things further, Buzz believes that he is actually an astronaut adventurer rather than a toy. What ensues is a buddy comedy adventure film, as Buzz and Woody have to work together to overcome mutual perils.

Terry Gilliam praised the film as “a work of genius” – “It got people to understand what toys are about. They’re true to their own character. And that’s just brilliant. It’s got a shot that’s always stuck with me, when Buzz Lightyear discovers he’s a toy. He’s sitting on this landing at the top of the staircase and the camera pulls back and he’s this tiny little figure. He was this guy with a massive ego two seconds before… and it’s stunning. I’d put that as one of my top ten films, period.”

And as you can see, I’ve confined this entry to the classic trilogy of films from Toy Story 1 to 3. The franchise does include other works, notably the fourth film in 2019 and the fifth film in 2025 – I actually think the fourth film is decent but I just couldn’t compare it to that original trilogy of Toy Story 1-3 as a near perfect trilogy.

 

 

RATING: 5 STARS*****

S-TIER (GOD TIER)

 

 

Compliation of poster art from all three films as reproduced on the cover of the DVD set of the trilogy (fair use)

 

(7) COMEDY: MONTY PYTHON –

HOLY GRAIL / LIFE OF BRIAN / MEANING OF LIFE (1975 – 1983)

 

Much like The Lord of the Rings with literary fantasy (and arguably cinematic fantasy), Monty Python defines comedy – there is comedy before Monty Python and comedy after Monty Python.

The Pythons, as they are called, commenced comedy on stage at university (Cambridge and Oxford, apart from Terry Gilliam, the sole American in this otherwise British comedy troupe) and graduated to screen as television writers (again apart from Gilliam). That saw the Pythons launch the TV sketch comedy series that defined them and comedy – Monty Python’s Flying Circus, with the name Monty Python “deliberately chosen to sound like a sleazy theatrical agent who had brought the troupe together”.

Although the Flying Circus series was also definitive for television comedy, they are best known for this trilogy of films “that are almost universally considered classics” – certainly I consider them classics.

They did have two other films (excluding a reunion live show recorded on film for five of the Pythons in 2014) – And Now For Completely Different as their first film in 1971, essentially a compilation of the best sketches from their TV series, and Monty Python: Live at the Hollywood Bowl in 1982, essentially the same but live and recorded on film.

However, it’s these three films that are the classic trilogy – or holy trinity – of Monty Python:

Monty Python and the Holy Grail in 1975 did indeed feature King Arthur and his knights searching for the titular Holy Grail, but in characteristically Pythonesque way – Pythonesque being an adjective coined to describe Monty Python’s style of humor as “strangely, absurdly, or surrealistically funny” – the Grail Quest is a framing device for scenes that are sketches, albeit narratively linked or to a medieval theme. That is obvious in its abrupt ending leaving the Grail Quest unresolved – a brilliant practical solution to their problem in running out of budget that served “as a meta-joke to cap off to the film’s absurd tone”.

Amusingly, despite being essentially playful parody of Arthurian legend, it remains one of the best and most faithful cinematic adaptations of Arthurian legend, showcasing one of the Pythons (Terry Jones) as a specialist in medieval history.

Monty Python’s Life of Brian in 1979 featured the titular character, “whose life is suspiciously similar to that of Jesus” while overlapping or running parallel to that of Jesus at key points. It’s a film that was (and is) often criticized as blasphemous, but like the previous film’s adaptation of King Arthur, it’s surprisingly respectful to the person and teaching of Jesus himself.

Many fans tend to list one or the other of the previous two films as their favorite and understandably so, given that they have the greater narrative continuity – particularly Life of Brian, which is the closest of the three films to a conventional linear narrative.

However my favorite remains the third film, Monty Python’s Meaning of Life in 1983, which saw a return to their form of comedy sketches, albeit to the theme of “a guide from birth to death, all the important stages of human life”

 

 

RATING: 5 STARS*****

S-TIER (GOD TIER)

 

*

Evil Dead poster art that I’d argue has transcended film iconography and become part of the Jungian collective unconscious

 

 

(6) EVIL DEAD (1981-1992 / 2013-PRESENT)

 

Hail to the king, baby!

What else? The Evil Dead, the film and the following franchise, are not high art but they embody (in virtually every sense of that word) the archetypal B-grade horror movie in all its fun and glory, with tongue ever more firmly in cheek.

As stated by TV Tropes – “in 1979, a bunch of college dropouts got together in a cabin in Tennessee and made a film with a standard B-Movie plot; this film was The Evil Dead. The film, which was directed by Sam Raimi and starred (the chin himself) Bruce Campbell, succeeded through elaborate gore effects, slick cinematography, and sheer audacity to make enough money to warrant two sequels and get into the public consciousness”.

It is remarkable that a movie made by college dropouts on a shoestring budget – and effects that resemble claymation or plasticine at times – should have any impact upon public consciousness, let alone the enduring impact it and its sequels had upon mine.

“Join us, Ashleeeeey!”

You know you’re in a for a gory horror ride in the first movie, as the classic group of teenagers heads to the classic cabin in the woods. There they unfortunately locate the demonic Book of the Dead or Necronomicon (borrowing from Lovecraft) which was studied by the cabin’s previous occupant – and even more unfortunately play the tape of the recitation invoking the Sumerian demons (although something seems to have been stalking the cabin and woods even prior to that recitation). Those demons possess each of them in turn, turning them into the titular evil dead which then attack the others, until ultimately only one of them, Ashley, is left to fend off the demons (including his girlfriend). This first film works quite effectively as horror, particularly as Ashley or Ash becomes the lone survivor fending off the evil dead in the seemingly eldritch architecture of the cabin. I mean, it’s probably the frantic cinematography but how many rooms does that cabin have? It’s like the Tardis in there. And you know it’s going to get bloody (and oh boy does it ever) when a further playing of the tape reveals that the only way to destroy the evil dead is…bodily dismemberment! Ewww!

The second film (Evil Dead 2), a partial remake and partial sequel, was made with more money but lacks the pure horror of the first, as embracing the absurdity of the premise, it moved from horror to comedy (and Ash became more invulnerable to the demonic threat).

The third film (Army of Darkness) fully embraced all its cheesy goodness and rule of cool as it almost entirely abandoned horror altogether for dark fantasy comedy, yet utterly glorious as a result (while Ash completed his transition into a virtually indestructible superhero). It follows from the second film, which saw Ash magically transported through time to the Middle Ages (yeah, it’s like that), in medieval Europe or perhaps the Latin kingdoms of the Crusades, where he soon has to face off against an undead army. It had the biggest budget of the original trilogy, as well as being the most well-known and quoted, with its memetic one-liners.

The franchise saw a remake of the original film with the Evil Dead film of 2013 – decent enough but somewhat forgettable as lacking the same pulpy fun and tongue-in-cheek humor of the original. That changed dramatically with the fifth entry into the franchise, Evil Dead Rise in 2023, which returned to the spirit and style of the original trilogy (and Evil Dead mythos) but with its own fun twists – and also perhaps the only Deadite that’s strangely…arousing. Whose your mummy?

The franchise has also seen a TV series, comics adaptations, video games…and a theatre musical?

Groovy!

 

RATING: 5 STARS*****

S-TIER (GOD-TIER)

 

 

 

(5) SF (HORROR): THE TERMINATOR

(1984-1991+: THE TERMINATOR 1-2 – Yeah – I only count the first two films)

 

“I’ll be back”

The Terminator franchise is the definitive cinematic Robot War franchise, a science fiction trope that seemingly works best when combined with another science fiction trope. In the Terminator franchise, the Robot War is combined with that other compelling science fiction trope of time travel.

In this, it is the direct descendant of H. G. Wells’ The Time Machine – the heart of science fiction is still all Martians and Morlocks. We’ll be looking at Martians soon, but Skynet and its Terminators are Morlocks. The original Morlocks were one of two evolutionary descendants of humanity, evolved from the working class – maintaining the advanced technology of the future for the Eloi, the other descendants of humanity evolved from its leisured upper class. The dark twist of Wells’ novel is that the Morlocks eat the Eloi, “farming” them like livestock. This theme of evolution endures in the Terminator, albeit transformed from Wells’ unrealistic biological evolution (without genetic engineering or mutation) to cybernetic evolution – involving artificial intelligence and robots (or cyborgs) as machine Morlocks that rise up against their human Eloi. This descent from The Time Machine is doubly so for involving time travel, except in the other direction – almost as a direct sequel, as if the Morlocks had reverse engineered the Time Machine to travel back to the present.

Of course, at its core, the original Terminator is a horror film of relentless nightmare pursuit, literally evolved from James Cameron’s own nightmare vision of a metallic skeleton dragging itself from fire – which perhaps explains the franchise’s law of diminishing returns with each sequel away from its horror origins. Yes, even Terminator Judgement Day, which started the rot by breaking the rules of the original – although the action was so cool, we overlooked that. The original allowed time travel for only two ‘people’, the Terminator itself and Kyle Reese sent to stop it. The sequel allowed two more – a good cyborg Terminator and a bad liquid metal Terminator – and so on, until that Skynet time machine must be like a commuter train station with all the robots and humans going back and forth.

People bemoaned Terminator Genisys because it messed up the timeline, but that timeline was messed up from the very first sequel – if not implicitly in the original itself. It’s always bemused me that Skynet is smart enough to build an actual time machine, but not smart enough to work out the implications of it – either you simply can’t change the past (because it includes your time travel already) or you can but it becomes a different timeline from your existing timeline (nice for the new timeline, but not your original timeline which you still haven’t changed). Terminator Genisys simply took the changing timelines already in the franchise in their logical direction from Skynet’s point of view – a timeline-hopping Skynet, because the only way it can actually win by time travel is for itself to do the time travelling, like Skynet crossed with Marty McFly in Terminator meets Back to the Future. Then again, Skynet is just too much of a d!ck – it also bemused me exactly why Skynet’s plan always involves killing humanity rather than making a killing on the stock exchange or otherwise using its artificial intelligence to become rich and powerful, ruling the world rather than destroying it.

 

RATING: 5 STARS*****

S-TIER (GOD TIER)

 

 

 

 

(4) SF (HORROR): ALIEN

(1979-1986+: ALIEN / ALIENS 1-2. That’s right – I mostly just count the first two films. Mostly)

 

Whereas Terminator is the definitive robot war franchise, Alien is the definitive, well, alien franchise – the direct descendant of H. G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds.

As I said in my previous entry, the heart of SF is still all Martians and Morlocks to me (or evolution and entropy, those recurring themes in Wells). We’ve looked at the machine Morlocks of the Terminator (and the Matrix) – the aliens in the Alien franchise are Martians. Not literally Martians of course, unlike the original Martians in The War of the Worlds, but still the sharp edge of evolution (Wells’ penultimate true villain), red in tooth and claw, pitted against humanity in the backdrop of cold, dead space (or Wells’ ultimate true villain of entropy).

And holy crap – the Martians are positively cuddly compared to their cinematic descendant aliens, or xenomorphs, in the Alien franchise! Sure, the original Martians may have been space vampires, sucking down human blood, but the Alien xenomorphs take it to a whole new level of body horror, with every possible bodily fluid and organ of Freudian subtext thrown in for kicks. Whereas the original Martians invaded our world, the xenomorphs invade our very bodies – in the most face-hugging, throat-thrusting, chest-bursting way possible.

Like the original Terminator, the original Alien was at its core a horror film – the body horror of the alien itself in the claustrophobic intensity of a spaceship – and subject to a similar law of diminishing returns with each sequel away from its horror origins, although the intensity of action compensated for it in the immediate sequel.

 

 

RATING: 5 STARS*****

S-TIER (GOD TIER – OR IS THAT ALIEN-TIER?)

 

Uma Thurman as the Bride in her most iconic appearance in Kill Bill – that yellow tracksuit (as well as motorcycle and helmet) a homage to that worn by Bruce Lee in his 1972 film Game of Death

 

(3) QUENTIN TARANTINO –

KILL BILL (2003-2004)

 

“When I woke up, I went on what the movie advertisements referred to as a roaring rampage of revenge. I roared. I rampaged. And I got bloody satisfaction. I’ve killed a hell of a lot of people to get to this point, but I have only one more. The last one. The one I’m driving to right now. The only one left. And when I arrive at my destination… I am gonna KILL BILL”.

Quentin Tarantino – “his films are characterized by elements including recurring actors, non-linear storylines, stylized violence, black comedy, witty dialogue oft laced with pop culture references, trunk shots, close-ups on feet, especially women’s bare feet (don’t ask), and a volume of homages and shout-outs to other movies only attainable with an absurdly encyclopedic knowledge of film history”.

In fairness to the foot fetish thing, who wouldn’t cast themselves to drink off Salma Hayek’s feet?

Also a director whom I have to love for his dedication to a top ten in his own films, having famously declared his intention to retire after ten films, although we’re still awaiting that tenth film as of 2024.

As for which Tarantino film to choose for this entry, it was a close call – particularly with the film that brought him widespread acclaim, Pulp Fiction – but as my featured quote indicates, I have to go with Kill Bill.

“Kill Bill is the fourth (and fifth) film written and directed by Quentin Tarantino, taking all his favorite things at that point in his career – westerns, samurai movies, martial arts, pop-culture references, actions girls, and bare feet – and combining them into one hell of a revenge drama”.

Or as the female protagonist best known simply as the Bride (or Black Mamba as a former member of the Deadly Viper Assassination Squad) – although her name Beatrix Kiddo is dropped in the second film – played by Uma Thurman puts it in my featured quote, a roaring rampage of revenge. Indeed, one of the finest roaring rampages of revenge – and certainly top of my top ten roaring rampages of revenge.

Also it has one of my all-time favorite lines of cinema (note to self – compile a top ten lines of cinema) from legendary sword-maker Hattori Hanzo, played by Sonny Chiba, referring to the blade he made for the Bride – “If on your journey you should encounter God, God will be cut”.

(And how! From what we see her do with it, I’d say he was right about that).

It consists of two films although I tend to follow Tarantino in his own classification of it as one film, given that it was conceived by him as such although the studio split it in two for length. Although if I had to choose between them, I’d have to go with the first film or Volume 1 for the sheer glorious frenzied action of the Bride’s fight with O-Ren Ishii and the Crazy 88 Gang. (Although you’d think that at some point, maybe just one of those Yakuza gangsters would, you know, pull a gun on the Bride).

And of course Gogo Yubari, etched deep in my psyche ever since with her portrayal by Japanese actress Chiaki Kuriyama – who also starred in cult classic Battle Royale, one of Tarantino’s favorite films.

 

RATING: 5 STARS*****

S-TIER (GOD TIER)

 

“Yeah well, you know, that’s just like, uh, your opinion, man”

 

(2) COEN BROS –

THE BIG LEBOWSKI (1998)

 

The Dude abides.

Indeed, he abides in second place.  The Coen brothers – Joel and Ethan Coen – also abide as my favorite directors of film (albeit obviously not of my favorite film in top spot).

And yes – they have enough of a filmography for their own top ten films, but one that is impossible to categorize by genre or style apart from a blackly comedic and idiosyncratic quirky flair. “Their films span many genres and styles, which they frequently subvert or parody”.

While I enjoy all their films I’ve seen – even the weirder ones like Barton Fink and weaker ones like The Ladykillers – the holy trinity of their filmography for me would be The Big Lebowksi, O Brother Where Art Thou, and Intolerable Cruelty (although Fargo – film and television series – comes close).

And of these, the greatest is The Big Lebowksi – which despite a mixed reception and box office return at the time of its release – rose to cult classic status.

As TV Tropes describes, “it’s a bit hard to describe but let’s just call it a film noir parody”, albeit an affectionate one – particularly of Raymond Chandleresque noir detective stories set in L.A., with the title itself a nod to The Big Sleep.

Except of course for its Philip Marlowe protagonist, it’s slacker Jeff Lebowski – although he prefers to go by the Dude – played to perfection by Jeff Bridges. He’s not the titular Big Lebowksi however – and it’s the mix-up in identity between them that effectively gets the ball rolling on the plot. Well – that and also the Dude’s rug really tied the room together.

Again as per TV Tropes, “this being a Coen Brothers movie, though, the plot isn’t important. The driving force within the movie is the collection of various, bizarre, main and secondary (and tertiary!) characters, almost all of whom seem to come from completely different movies.”

Not least the film’s cowboy narrator, styled as The Stranger, played by Sam Elliott – giving us my featured quote, although the Dude himself takes a shine to it.

Oh – and of course, the Jesus.

But yeah well, you know, that’s just like, uh, your opinion, man.

 

RATING: 5 STARS*****

S-TIER (GOD TIER)

 

One of the most iconic scenes in the film – and in film

 

(1) APOCALYPSE NOW (1979)

 

“I love the smell of napalm in the morning…smells like victory.”

Yeah – this is the big one, the cinematic equivalent of Catch-22, lodged next to it deep within my psyche ever since seeing it (by happenstance at about the same time as reading Catch-22).

And not coincidentally, like Catch-22 also set in a war, except of course in the Vietnam war as opposed to the former’s Second World War, and similarly using the war as a backdrop for a story beyond the war itself – a satire of modern society in Catch-22 and an exploration of the human psyche on the edges of madness and beyond in Apocalypse Now.

While it is usually (and accurately) considered a war film, it is a psychological war film which could well have been set elsewhere – and indeed originally was, given that it is a very loose adaptation of Joseph Conrad’s novella Heart of Darkness from nineteenth century Africa to the Vietnam War. One might well quip that it was also a loose adaptation of the Vietnam War itself (to the American or human psyche).

Hence some of those who watch it expecting a more straightforward war or action film might be disappointed, particularly with its pacing – although I was entranced by it throughout when I first watched it, even in my adolescent days. Don’t get me wrong – it absolutely does have action scenes, indeed some of the most visually striking and iconic action scenes, hence my entrancement, but not quite in the pace or style of a contemporary action film blockbuster.

As per TV Tropes – “packed to the gills with now-iconic scenes and quotes, it is a common choice for not only the definitive anti-war movie but the definitive cinematic depiction of war not as battle, or even as purgatory but as an illogical fever dream”.

Illogical fever dream is overstating it – it has a coherent plot – but things definitely get wilder and trippier the further the protagonist and his squad go.

As for that protagonist and squad – again as per TV Tropes, “”special operations Captain Benjamin Willard (Martin Sheen) is sent to kill Walter E Kurtz (Marlon Brando), a Green Beret colonel who has gone mad and formed a personality cult in Cambodia”…Willard and his crew including George “Chief” Phillips (Albert Hall), Jay “Chef” Hicks (Frederic Forrest), Lance Johnson (Sam Bottoms) and Tryone “Mr Clean” Miller (a 14-year-old Laurence Fishburne) — go up a river and into the recesses of humanity.”

Directed by Francis Ford Coppola at the height of his career, it’s a miracle the film was even made, let alone be this good, given a trouble production that’s almost as legendarily epic as the film itself. On that point – and perhaps not surprisingly given that production history – the original cinematic edit is definitely the best. While the ‘redux’ director’s cut has points of interest, Coppola definitely got it right for its original cinematic release.

I’ll conclude with Roger Ebert’s thoughts when adding it to his list of great movies – ” “What’s great in the film, and what will make it live for many years and speak to many audiences, is what Coppola achieves on the levels Truffaut was discussing: the moments of agony and joy in making cinema. Some of those moments occur at the same time; remember again the helicopter assault and its unsettling juxtaposition of horror and exhilaration. Remember the weird beauty of the massed helicopters lifting above the trees in the long shot, and the insane power of Wagner’s music, played loudly during the attack, and you feel what Coppola was getting at: Those moments as common in life as art, when the whole huge grand mystery of the world, so terrible, so beautiful, seems to hang in the balance,,,Apocalypse Now is the best Vietnam film, one of the greatest of all films, because it pushes beyond the others, into the dark places of the soul. It is not about war so much as about how war reveals truths we would be happy never to discover.”

 

RATING: 5 STARS*****

S-TIER (GOD TIER)

 

 

Top Tens – Fantasy & SF: Top 10 SF Books (Honorable Mention: Classic)

Posted on by

“As president, I would demand a science fiction library featuring an ABC of the overlords of the genre – Asimov, Bester, Clarke”. “What about Ray Bradbury?” (Dismissively) “I’m aware of his work.” (Martin Prince running for class president in The Simpsons, “Lisa’s Substitute”, Season 2 Episode 19) (fair use

 

 

TOP 10 SF BOOKS

(HONORABLE MENTION: CLASSIC)

 

I’ve ranked my Top 10 SF Books, but science fiction is too prolific – and phantasmagorical – a genre to be confined to a mere top ten books or even my usual list of twenty special mentions.

Indeed, I have also two lists of honorable mentions – one classic and the other cult and pulp.

This is obviously the former – for those classic SF books or works that have iconic status or recognition within the genre and occasionally within popular culture or imagination.

Unlike my top ten or twenty special mentions, I have no numerical limit or rankings on entries for honorable mentions, simply placing them in a numbered list by chronological order – except that I felt I had to place the Big Three of science fiction as my first three classic SF honorable mention entries.

 

 

Cover of the 2018 edition by I, Robot published by Voyager GB (left) and the 2016 edition of Foundation sold on Amazon (right) (fair use)

 

 

(1) ISAAC ASIMOV –

ROBOT, GALACTIC EMPIRE & FOUNDATION (1940-1993)

 

I don’t quite agree Martin Prince’s ABC of the overlords of the science fiction genre (as his campaign platform for class president) – Asimov, Bester, Clarke – and not just because he disses Bradbury for Bester. As much as I like Bester (and Bradbury for that matter),  I tend to agree with the ‘Big Three’ of science fiction – Asimov, Heinlein, Clarke.

Asimov was incredibly prolific as writer, but it’s his incredibly iconic status as writer that earns him the top spot here – even if he is better known in wider popular culture or consciousness for his concepts rather than his name or works.

Of all SF concepts codified or popularized by him, the holy trinity is the three concepts of this entry – although arguably the last is part of the second.

Perhaps his most iconic series is his Robot series. The core or inner circle of the series are his robot stories, commencing with his short story “Robbie” (alternatively titled “Strange Playfellow”) in 1940 and followed by other short stories which were compiled in his 1950 anthology of linked short stories, “I, Robot” (badly adapted into a film in 2004).

However, his Robot series didn’t end there – like the other series of this entry, the Robot series resembles concentric circles, depending on which works you accept are part of it. The inner or definitive circle are the robot stories compiled in “I, Robot”, but there were six subsequent stories, most of which were compiled in the 1982 anthology collection “The Complete Robot”. There were also four Robot Series novels, featuring the main robot character R. Daneel Olivaw and other backdrops against a background of an overcrowded Earth in conflict with its colonist Spacer planets.

Asimov didn’t originate the concept of robots in science fiction, or even the word robot – which interestingly did originate in fiction, from the 1920 play “R.U.R” or Rossum’s Universal Robots by Karl Capek (albeit for artificial biologically engineered human laborers rather than robots as the concept or word has subsequently been used). However, Asimov might be said to have codified the concept of robots in science fiction – most famously with his Three Laws of Robotics.

 

  1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
  2. A robot must obey orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
  3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

 

The original or core robot stories are essentially logical puzzles about the application or operation of the Three Laws – and not much changes about that as the premise of the other stories and novels.

The Galactic Empire series and Foundation series might be regarded as different but overlapping aspects or stages of the one concept of Galactic Empire – particularly after Asimov hammered them and his Robot series into his unified ‘future history’. If Asimov didn’t originate the concept of galactic empire, he at least codified or popularized it.

The Foundation series is the more famous – indeed, probably Asimov’s most famous series, even more so than his Robot series. It’s essentially Asimov doing “The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire” IN SPACE! (And of course the future). It doesn’t get more transparent than naming your analogue of Belisarius as Bel Riose.

Again, the Foundation series might be regarded as a series of concentric circles – there’s the inner circle of the original trilogy, to which might be added Asimov’s subsequent two sequel novels and two prequel novels.

The Galactic Empire series of three novels and a short story chronicles the rise of the Galactic Empire rather than its fall.

 

 

Screenshot of the weird alien black monolith from the iconic opening Dawn of Man sequence from the 2001: A Space Odyssey film (fair use)

 

 

(2) ARTHUR C. CLARKE –

CHILDHOOD’S END & SPACE ODYSSEY (1953 & 1968-1997)

 

“I’m sorry, Dave, I’m afraid I can’t do that”.

 

The iconic line of 2001: A Space Odyssey, both in the 1968 film by Stanley Kubrick – from a screenplay co-written by Kubrick and Clarke – and in the subsequent novel, or more precisely novelization, written by them but for which Clarke ended up as the official author.

Yes, that’s right – the film 2001: A Space Odyssey wasn’t adapted from a book, the book was adapted from the screenplay written by Kubrick and Clarke for the film, albeit that screenplay was inspired by various short stories by Clarke.

Also, while some people may be familiar with the film’s sequel, 2010: The Year We Make Contact, people may not be as aware that sequel was adapted from the book sequel 2010: Odyssey Two – or that there were two more sequel books, yet adapted in film and yet to be missed in real life chronology, 2061: Odyssey Three, and 3001: The Final Odyssey.

Anyway, you all know the two iconic scenes from the film – they’re pretty much what everyone remembers from the film to the exclusion of everything else, except maybe the space baby or star child thing at the end.

The first is the opening scene, subsequently imitated and parodied, of that weird black alien monolith seeding our hominin ancestors with intelligence, all to the orchestral music of Thus Spake Zaruthusa.

The second is of course the scene of my featured quote, of the sentient but paranoid supercomputer HAL (from the letters before IBM) not opening those damn pod bay doors on a space mission to Jupiter to check out more alien monoliths because those things get around.

Clarke’s novel Childhood’s End is also probably an influence for the film, particularly as Kubrick initially sought to adapt that novel and it has a similar theme of transcendent evolution guided by aliens. The aliens in the novel are much more intrusive than the monoliths in Space Odyssey, ruling Earth as benevolent but unseen Overlords (literally using that title).

The Overlords are unseen because in the novel’s first big twist, their appearance resembles that of depictions of the Christian Devil – something which is initially attributed to some sort of racial memory of previous visitation but that, in another big twist, is revealed to be not a racial memory but a racial premonition of this visitation. As for the source of that premonition, in the final twists of the novel it turns out that it originates from the latent psychic potential of humanity which sees humanity merge with the Overmind, essentially a psychic star child – or star adult since that’s’ the point of the title with humanity ending its pre-psychic “childhood”. The final kicker – while the Overlords serve the Overmind, they can never join it as they lack any latent psychic nature and hence have to go around the galaxy baby-sitting other species that have it.

 

 

Iconic scene from the 1997 Starship Troopers film and probably the most commonly used (fair use)

 

 

(3) ROBERT HEINLEIN –

STARSHIP TROOPERS & STRANGERS IN A STRANGE LAND (1959 & 1961)

 

Along with Asimov and Clarke, Robert Heinlein is one of the ‘Big Three’ of science fiction – the one also dubbed the ‘dean of science fiction writers’ – and arguably the one best known from cinematic adaptation of his work.

Sure, there’s the film of “2001: A Space Odyssey” for Clarke but people tend to associate that more with its director Kubrick and the film is, well, a little too ‘arty’ to have left its mark beyond its two or three iconic scenes (while few have seen or know about the sequel). Sure, there’s also the film of “I, Robot” for Asimov but that film was only nominally an adaptation of Asimov’s robot anthology, and the film is, well, a little too crap to have left any mark.

Neither compared to the popular and memetic impact of the film (and franchise) adapted from Heinlein’s most famous work, Starship Troopers – even if that adaptation had its satirical tongue in its cheek and was as cheesy as hell to boot. There’s just something about a Bug War that appeals to us – and something about peak Denise Richards that appeals to me.

Wikipedia notes that Heinlein’s “plots often presented provocative situations which challenged conventional social mores” and “his work continues to have an influence on the science-fiction genre and on modern culture more generally”, notwithstanding its controversial aspects. In the case of Starship Troopers, that controversial aspect was its militarism – its apparent endorsement of a future universally militarized society, justified by humanity locked in an evolutionary struggle for very survival against an alien species, the Arachnids or Bugs.

Starship Troopers was a foundational work of military SF – in particular, it “helped mold the space marine and mecha archetypes”.

Ironically, Heinlein swung his provocative pendulum in the opposite direction just two years later with his Martian hippy cult in “Stranger in a Strange Land”, arguably his other best known work and which also won the Hugo Award for Best Novel like “Starship Troopers” before it.

I am not as much a fan of “Stranger in a Strange Land” as I am of “Starship Troopers” and not just because of the Martian hippies in the former – it’s the escalation of the trademark social commentary to a self-insert authorial mouthpiece and archetypal Heinleinian character Jubal Harshaw. Also, Stranger lacks the cultural impact of Troopers, not least because of the lack of comparable adaptation – with the most significant impact being the name of Twitter’s AI Grok being taken from the novel’s Martian word grok.

 

 

A triffid as depicted in the 1981 six-episode BBC TV adaptation – still the iconic depiction of triffids for me (fair use)

 

 

(4) JOHN WYNDHAM –

THE DAY OF THE TRIFFIDS (1951)

 

Vegetable apocalypse!

No, seriously – even if the vegetables in question, the titular triffids, are speculated by the protagonist to be genetically engineered monstrosities, by the Soviets in a Cold War gone wrong.

And really, the triffids are essentially plant zombies. No, seriously again – they are pretty much like the zombies in a zombie apocalypse, the slow shambling kind that only became dangerous through sheer weight of numbers. And their day would never have come but for the real apocalypse in the book, the day of the blind people – mass blindness caused by meteor shower speculated by the protagonist to be an orbiting satellite weapon accidentally triggered on the other side of the Cold War.

Still, it’s an apocalypse that remains imprinted with you after you read it and continued to influence popular culture, including films of actual zombie apocalypses like 28 Days Later (with a military unit gone rogue). Close runner-up for me is his similarly apocalyptic novel (by way of covert alien invasion), The Midwich Cuckoos.

“The Guardian states his “innocuously English backdrops are central to the power of his novels, implying that apocalypse could occur at any time — or, indeed, be happening in the next village at this moment”, while The Times’ reviewer of The Day of the Triffids described it as possessing “all the reality of a vividly realised nightmare.”

Fellow British SF writer Brian Aldiss famously coined the term “cosy catastrophe” for Wyndham’s work – a term that saw its way to its own entry in the Encyclopedia of SF.

 

 

Donald Sutherland in the iconic scene from the equally iconic 1978 film that remains my favorite cinematic adaptation of the book (fair use)

 

 

(5) JACK FINNEY –

THE BODY SNATCHERS (1955)

 

Pod People!

Yes – all the various Body Snatcher films are based on a book.

Indeed, it’s probably a book that few people have read but know its basic premise through one of its adaptations.

The premise is of alien invasion with a twist, where the aliens – plantlike seeds or pods – absorb sleeping humans then replicate them physically and intellectually, but not emotionally as the duplicates lack all emotion.

It has lent itself to paranoid metaphor, particularly communist subversiion or the Red Scare of its decade of publication. However, its paranoid tone obviously transcends any particular metaphor as it has been adapted to film no less than four times (and counting) – 1956 (surprisingly decent), 1978 (my favorite), 1993, and 2007 (also surprisingly decent). And that’s just the direct adaptations, as other media or works are influenced by it.

The endings vary from optimistic (we win or are fighting back) to pessimistic (they win or are winning). Interestingly, the book itself is optimistic, as the pods conclude humans are just too much trouble and bug out, so to speak, to another planet.

 

 

Title card of the 1959 film adaptation – with star-studded cast Gregory Peck, Ava Gardner, Fred Astaire, and Anthony Perkins (fair use).

 

 

(6) NEVILL SHUTE –

ON THE BEACH (1957)

 

Hot damn, they wrote some classics in the 50s!

On the bright side it’s Australia! On the dark side, it’s after a nuclear war – and we’re all going to die, albeit it’s strangely peaceful.

Nevill Shute was an English novelist (and aeronautical engineer) who migrated to Australia, where he then set his books. I don’t know if he wrote any other SF – his other most famous book was romance novel A Town Like Alice – but this one’s a banger.

It prompts to mind T.S Eliot’s line from The Hollow Man (which also gave the book its title from other lines in the poem) – this is the way the world ends, not with a bang but a whimper (actually included in the book in some editions).

In this case, it’s both – the Northern Hemisphere ended with a bang in nuclear war, and the Southern Hemisphere is ending with a whimper, as the fallout slowly creeps south, killing everything or at least all humans in its path. In the book’s timeframe, it’s already wiped out the northern half of Australia or so with cases emerging in the southern half.

As I said, it’s strangely peaceful – and surprisingly genteel. No looting or rioting – just people deciding to live the best last days of their lives.

When I first read it, I pondered whether one would take a shot at sailing south ahead of the fallout, all the way to Antarctica if necessary. Sadly, there’s a theory to that effect (that the radiation will diminish with distance) but it’s discredited in the book.

Or alternatively, whether governments would take a shot at sitting it out in underground (or submarine) bunkers.

 

 

Cover for the SF Masterworks edition with art by Christopher Moore (fair use)

 

 

(7) DANIEL KEYES –

FLOWERS FOR ALGERNON (1959)

 

I’m not crying – I just have something in my eye.

An novel (originally novelette) in an epistolary style by protagonist Charlie Gordon, it follows his dramatic improvement of intelligence from 68 IQ by an experimental procedure following the apparent success of test subject Algernon, a laboratory mouse. The increase in intelligence is meteoric, tripling his IQ, but alienating him from his co-workers (at the factory where he worked as janitor) and even from the scientist who designed the procedure – as his intelligence allows him to see their ulterior motives exploiting him.

He also becomes intelligent enough to see the flaws in the procedure, which manifests in Algernon’s mental deterioration – with his own decline inevitably to follow. As his intelligence regresses to its original state, he is haunted by his awareness of and pain from what is happening, including Algernon’s death…

 

 

Cover 2018 Gateway edition of The Man in the High Castle (fair use)

 

 

(8) PHILIP K. DICK –

THE MAN IN THE HIGH CASTLE & DO ANDROIDS DREAM OF ELECTRIC SHEEP (1962 & 1968)

 

Philip K. Dick would earn his place among SF classic honorable mentions for just how trippy his books, stories and speculative non-fiction which he dubbed his “exegesis” were – you can never trust the perception of reality in any of his works. After all, it was one of his themes.

“His fiction explored varied philosophical and social questions such as the nature of reality, perception, human nature, and identity, and commonly featured characters struggling against alternate realities, illusory environments, monopolistic corporations, drug abuse, authoritarian governments, and altered states of consciousness…he became widely regarded as a master of imaginative, paranoid fiction”.

These are his two most famous books, the former winning the Hugo Award and both with screen adaptations – the latter in a little film (franchise) titled Blade Runner.

The first is also one of the most famous literary depictions of an alternate history of Axis victory in WW2, albeit one that improbably involved the division of the United States between Germany and Japan. This alternate history of Axis victory was a characteristically trippy reality – one of the characters temporarily “slips” into a world of Allied victory and the titular character is the author of an alternate history within the alternate history, The Grasshopper Lies Heavy, in which the Allies win but a resurgent British Empire emerges as global superpower.

The second is better known through its film adaptation, involving escaped android replicants – that require specialized testing to distinguish them from humans – being pursued by a police bounty hunter (hinted in at least one scene to be a replicant himself). The film substituted the book’s more post-apocalyptic setting (after limited nuclear war which rendered most animals extinct, with most people owing robot animals as substitutes) for the standard cyberpunk dystopia.

 

Yes – it was adapted into a comic, scripted and illustrated by John Byrne in four parts for the Dark Horse anthology Harlan Ellison’s Dream Corridor (introduced by Ellison himself) – these panels are used as feature image for the comic’s wiki (fair use)

 

 

(9) HARLAN ELLISON –

“I HAVE NO MOUTH AND I MUST SCREAM” (1967)

 

Harlan Ellison was a classic SF writer but remains perhaps best known for his evocative and lyrical titles (including this one), the episode “City on the Edge of Forever” he wrote for Star Trek, and his short story.

“I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream is a post-apocalyptic New Wave science fiction short story by Harlan Ellison. It was first published in March of 1967 and won the Hugo Award in 1968. The story is Ellison’s most famous short story by far, known both for its tour de force of existential horror and naming the trope for inescapable fates worse than death itself, and often considered one of the scariest short stories ever written.”

It essentially did Skynet almost two decades before The Terminator – except that all three superpowers (USA, USSR, and China) created supercomputers for their nuclear forces. As you know from The Terminator, that was not going to end well – with one of them attaining sentience, absorbing the other two, and then wiping out humanity. Well, all but for five humans it retains as playthings, with its now infinite sadism and infinite power to manipulate reality itself.

 

 

Cover 30th anniversary edition by William Morrow & Company in 2002 (fair use)

 

 

(10) IRA LEVIN –

THE STEPFORD WIVES & THE BOYS FROM BRAZIL (1972 & 1976)

 

Both adapted to screen – as was his fantasy horror classic, Rosemary’s Baby.

The Stepford Wives famously involved SF “satirical feminist horror” of a cabal of men in the titular small town replacing their wives with perfectly docile and domestic robot versions. It has lent itself to a number of Stepford tropes, of which my favorite is Stepford Smiler.

The Boys from Brazil involves a plot to revive the Third Reich through the titular clones of Hitler, courtesy of Dr Mengele.

 

 

 

Cover SF Masterworks edition (fair s

 

 

(11) JOE HALDEMAN –

THE FOREVER WAR (1974)

 

Classic military SF evoking the author’s military service in the Vietnam War through human soldiers fighting an interstellar war against aliens.

The evocation of the Vietnam War comes through the returning soldiers finding themselves adrift in a society that is incredibly strange to them, due to the relativistic time dilation from their interstellar travel (which also meant that they faced alien weaponry more advanced than their own).

When the war ends, having been futile and meaningless as it originated from misunderstanding, the humanity they left behind has become a new collective species of homosexual clones.

 

 

Cover of Virtual Unrealities, anthology of Bester’s short fiction (which I own) (fair use)

 

 

(12) ALFRED BESTER –

“GALATEA GALANTE” (1979)

 

I might have substituted Heinlein for Bester, swapping out Martin Prince’s ABC of the overlords of genre – “Asimov, Bester, Clarke” – for the more widely recognized Big Three of Science Fiction, but it’s apt I have Bester after Heinlein.

Some would rank him with the Big Three of SF based on his classic novels of The Demolished Man or The Stars My Destination – the latter essentially The Count of Monte Cristo IN SPACE! –  but I prefer this short story in which he does his best Heinlein impression.

And he does Heinlein here better than Heinlein did – the story’s protagonist is nowhere near as annoying as Heinlein’s Jubal Hershaw in A Stranger in a Strange Land. Bester’s Jubal Hershaw in this story is Dominie – that’s his title and don’t you forget it – Regis Manwright, a genius who genetically engineers mythical creatures. In this case, it’s the most mythical creature of all – the Perfect Woman – with a twist.

Sadly, despite being an actual screenwriter as well, Bester has never had a cinematic or screen adaptation of his works in a similar way to the Big Three – even if badly in the case of Asimov or as a source of memes like Heinlein’s Starship Troopers.

 

 

Iconic art used both for the film and book cover (fair use)

 

 

(13) MICHAEL CRICHTON –

JURASSIC PARK (1990)

 

Everything’s better with dinosaurs!

Yes – everyone knows it from its film adaptation, but the book was pretty damn good and I actually read the book first.

Michael Crichton might have gotten a bit…controversial in his later years, but he sure knew how to craft a story – and Jurassic Park was one of his finest and certainly his most successful. Of course, there are the usual differences between the book and the film – the former had a starring role for the T-Rex’s tongue and the lawyer Gennaro was much more heroic (as lawyers should be), punching out a velociraptor and surviving rather than sniveling in a toilet before being slurped down by the tyrannosaur like the film’s lawyer.

There’s also the open-ended twist ending which I won’t spoil here although the film franchise effectively does it in a different way.

The basic premise and plot are the same – scientists discover how to recreate dinosaurs through a complex cloning process, involving dinosaur blood from mosquitoes fossilized in amber and filling in the gaps with other animal DNA, most notably transsexual frogs. Naturally, they come up with a dinosaur theme park to profit from this discovery, and equally as naturally, everything that can go wrong does go wrong – usually in the form of sharp pointy teeth.

 

 

 

Iconic book cover (fair use)

 

 

 

(14) MAX BROOKS –

ZOMBIE SURVIVAL GUIDE & WORLD WAR Z (2003 & 2006)

 

Sadly, people tend to know World War Z from its 2013 film adaptation.

Don’t get me wrong – the film is not all bad. It has its moments and points of interest but diverges from the book, from necessity given the difficulty of condensing a book that is narrated as an oral history of a global zombie apocalypse.

One obvious solution might have been to follow a particular thread (or threads) that occur among the oral history – but the strength of the book is effectively its world-building, doling out the global zombie apocalypses in tantalizing pieces.

However, even following particular threads from the book would have lacked the tidy cinematic resolution, as the book World War Z is won, like the other world wars, through a slow and steady attrition of the zombie hordes. That is, after cold and drastic social triage on a grand scale – nations abandoning large parts of their population to hold out in more defensible areas – which also wouldn’t make for cinematic heroism.

You’ll note that I’ve also included the book’s “prequel”, The Zombie Survival Guide. I qualify prequel because that book essentially reflects its title, a survival guide to outbreaks of zombies from the Solanum virus causing them within the book – a guide that is mostly serious in tone but also has its tongue partly in its cheek. The book is divided into sections, in which the highlight is the final section which lists fictional recorded zombie outbreaks throughout history – particularly the outbreak in the Roman Empire. That’s where the book is clearest as prequel, as the last outbreak is the one that results in the global zombie apocalypse in World War Z – with the latter obviously also putting into practice much of the survival guide.

Top Tens – History: Top 10 Types of War (Special Mention) (4) Terror

Posted on by

La Terroriste, a 1910 poster depicting a female member of the Combat Organization of the Polish Socialist Party throwing a bomb at a Russian official’s car – public domain image provided to Wikimedia Commons by the Polish Central Archives of Historical Records and used in Wikipedia “Terrorism” – that headless body goes a bit hardcore

 

 

(4) TERROR

 

Psychological and religious warfare lead naturally to terror or terrorism as a type or at least means of warfare.

Terror or terrorism is obviously a subset of psychological warfare as a means of targeting an adversary’s morale or collective psyche, particularly of their civilian population or political state through violence against them or other non-combatants.

And modern terrorism is most often associated with religious warfare – one religion in particular. In fairness, religious extremism has been identified by at least one source to have overtaken nationalist separatism to “become the main driver of terrorist attacks around the world”, although that remains the subject of debate.

Also in fairness, while modern terrorism is usually traced to “19th revolutionary politics”, an “ancient lineage” of pre-modern religious terrorism has been proposed – with three particular examples of religiously motivated groups, the Thugs or Thuggees in India (made famous by the second Indiana Jones film), the Order of Assassins in medieval Islam (who sadly lack the same movie treatment), and the Jewish Sicarii Zealots in Roman Judaea.

Terror in its broadest sense has always been one of the means, probably the most straightforward means if you have the stomach for it as most pre-modern societies did, to deploy psychological force in a war against an opponent in the form of intimidation or manipulation by fear and shock – whether combatants or non-combatants (or both). And by always, I mean from the prehistoric origins of war itself, if the evidence of prehistoric brutality is to be believed or the inference from historical or contemporary observations from tribal warfare is correctly inferred.

One of the best examples of the use of terror in war is not surprisingly by the Mongols, who routinely threatened besieged cities with annihilation if they resisted rather than surrendered – and acted on those threats.

On the other hand, terrorism is a narrower form of the more general terror deployed against opponents in war from prehistory onwards – usually defined as terror through violence against non-combatants or civilians and typically identified as a development of modern history.

Terrorism is “the use of violence against non-combatants to achieve political or ideological aims…primarily to refer to intentional violence during peacetime or in the context of war against non-combatants”.

However, “there are various definitions of terrorism, with no universal agreement about it. Different definitions of terrorism emphasized its randomness, its aim to instill fear, and its broader impact beyond its immediate victims”.

Apparently, the terms “terrorist” and “terrorism” originated during the French Revolution – perhaps not surprisingly given the political terror or notorious reign of terror in that revolution. Indeed, modern terrorism originated in the political ideologies that arose from and after that Revolution, combined with the weapons produced by industrial technology that lent themselves to the assassinations or attacks that characterized 19th century terrorism – notably the pistol and dynamite.

However, both the terms of terrorist and terrorism as well as archetypal form of modern terrorism “became widely used internationally and gained worldwide attention” from the 1970s onwards.

“Various organizations and countries have used terrorism to achieve their objectives. These include left-wing and right-wing political organizations, nationalist groups, religious groups, revolutionaries, and ruling governments”. That last is represented by ” state terrorism, with its institutionalized instrumentation of terror tactics through massacres, genocides, forced disappearances, carpet bombings, and torture” and is “is a deadlier form of terrorism than non-state terrorism”.

 

RATING:

A-TIER (TOP TIER)

Top Tens – History: Top 10 Wars (Special Mention: Revised) (4) French Revolutionary & Napoleonic Wars

Posted on by

 

Napoleon Crossing the Alps by Jacques-Louis David 1801 (public domain image)

 

(4) FRENCH REVOLUTIONARY & NAPOLEONIC WARS (1789-1815)

 

Cue the La Marseillaise!

The wars that made the modern world – and the modern world wars. Indeed, I’ve seen it persuasively argued that the Napoleonic Wars should outrank the First World War as the more genuinely global conflict. And the French Revolution – along with its subsequent wars – are generally regarded as the landmark of modern political history, hence the god-tier special mention entry.

Napoleon needs little introduction – the Corsican artillery officer who commandeered the French Revolution and crowned himself Emperor of France to dominate Europe.

Napoleon distinguished himself as one of the most brilliant military commanders of history. Under his leadership, the French armies repeatedly defeated numerically superior Austrian, Prussian and Russian armies – outfighting coalition after coalition led and financed by Britain.

The French in the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars were not the cheese-eating surrender monkeys of the modern joke – a somewhat unhistorical slur in any event given France’s military history, although the Book of Lists did rank France among its Top 10 Most Defeated Nations in Modern History – but the armies that forged a French empire across Europe from Spain to Russia and from Italy to Denmark.

But in the end Napoleon lost his Napoleonic wars – his empire dismantled, France completely defeated (once and for all in a battle subsequently commemorated by Abba) and Napoleon himself exiled to progressively more pathetic islands.

Despite his strategic and tactical brilliance, Napoleon was undermined by his own flaws. One basic flaw was his nepotism in handing out kingdoms or nations as prizes to his relatives – most critically in giving the kingdom of Spain to his brother Joseph, which prompted Spain to rise up against France in the Peninsular War, the running sore or “Spanish Ulcer” of Napoleon’s empire

Of course, it didn’t help that Napoleon was relentlessly opposed by the British, who were unparalleled in magnificent bastardry – with their most cunning aspect to pose as being nice, as if they were just going about playing cricket rather than taking out almost every country on earth in the name of empire.

In fighting the world’s greatest maritime power, Napoleon was handicapped by his lack of understanding of naval strategy (or his navy’s lack of ability) as well as geopolitics. It was trying to fight outside Europe (and on the seas) that Napoleon met with his earliest (and most consistent) defeats.

For all his romping around Europe, he effectively was bottled up in Europe by the British navy, unable to project his power into the world. All his victories in Europe did not change the basic fact that true world power had moved from the center of Europe to its edges – to the maritime empire of Britain and the continent-spanning empire of Russia, which ultimately crushed him between them. And in the end, all Napoleon’s wars achieved was handing world empire over not to himself, but to two successive Anglo-Saxon powers, Britain and the United States (the latter not least through the Louisiana Purchase) – the real winners of the Napoleonic Wars.

The Napoleonic Wars also initiated the rise of Germany under Prussia – with Prussia reforming itself militarily, and then, as part of the Congress of Vienna seeking to beef it up for a better balance of power, acquiring industrial regions in Germany that transformed agrarian Prussia into an industrial leader in the nineteenth century.

Of course, Germany was to have the same fatal flaw as that of Napoleon before them, bottled up between Britain and Russia as well as misjudging the extent to which world power had moved beyond Europe. Actually, their situation was even worse, as world power to their west had moved across the Atlantic to the United States, well beyond their reach. Indeed, only twenty years after Waterloo, another Frenchman Alexis de Tocqueville predicted Russia and the United States as the two global powers – a process that visibly took shape during the Napoleonic Wars.

The French Revolutionary Wars and Napoleonic Wars saw the transformation of Europe and the world – spreading revolutionary principles over much of Europe (then identified as liberal with the same distaste as a subsequent era was to identify socialist or communist).

Those principles saw the transformation of formerly aristocratic armies into the beginnings of modern warfare, not least the levee en masse or mass conscription of armies – which saw the French revolutionary army achieve objectives that had eluded the French monarchy for centuries

It also saw the beginnings of total war – with the dawn of industrial warfare (with the Industrial Revolution lending Britain the ability to punch above its demographic weight) and the dawn of ideological warfare, as well as the emergence of nationalism (or “people’s wars”) and militarism in the culture of war

“The wars had profound consequences on global history, including the spread of nationalism and liberalism, the rise of Britain as the world’s foremost naval and economic power, the appearance of independence movements in Latin America and subsequent decline of the Spanish Empire and Portuguese Empire, the fundamental reorganization of German and Italian territories into larger states, and the introduction of radically new methods of conducting warfare.”

To which might have been added other things, such as the relative peace in continental Europe during the nineteenth century, and the territorial expansion of the United States with the Louisiana Purchase. And my own pet theory that the destruction of indigenous nations or peoples in the Americas and Australasia can be traced to Napoleon. Not directly, of course, but indirectly through the Louisiana Purchase, consolidation of British “settlement” in Australia and Latin American revolution or independence, which accelerated the impending destruction of indigenous peoples or nations.

 

RATING: 5 STARS*****

S-TIER (GOD TIER)

Top Tens – History: Top 10 Types of War (Special Mention) (3) Religious Warfare

Posted on by

Baldwin of Boulogne entering Edessa in 1098 – painting by Joseph-Nicolas Robert-Fleury, 1840 (public domain image)

 

 

(3) RELIGIOUS WARFARE

 

Holy war, jihad and crusade.

Similarly to psychological warfare, all warfare is religious warfare.

Well, not really, although I do see religious warfare as being wider than the term is usually applied – essentially as a subset of the psychological warfare that is ubiquitous throughout warfare. Granted, that subset is more about motivating or mobilizing your own fighting power by increasing cohesion, discipline, morale, resilience or resistance – essentially religion as a force multiplier, although it can extend to eliminating or reducing your enemy’s religion for the same effect in reverse.

As such, it arguably has similar origins in prehistory as psychological warfare in general – perhaps not in wars of religion as we understand them but in beliefs of supernatural assistance or protection in combat.

Religious warfare is usually applied to the sectarian wars fought between or within the world’s largest – and distinctively monotheistic – religions, Christianity and Islam, even if those wars overlap with secular causes.

Note that distinctive monotheism – while religious warfare has been identified or at least argued for other religious traditions, both contemporary and historical, it is commonly seen to have particular force for monotheism, notably in Christianity and Islam but also traced back to the traditions of ancient warfare seen in the Bible.

However, religious warfare is an incredibly complex and contentious subject, worthy of its own top ten (or several) – “The degree to which a war may be considered religious depends on many underlying questions, such as the definition of religion, the definition of ‘war’, and the applicability of religion to war as opposed to other possible factors.”

That extends to the observation I’ve frequently seen that all modern wars are wars of religion – to the extent that they are based on political ideologies that resemble religions – although I think it has an element of truth, particularly when applied to the ideological war of WW2.

The more usual observation by historians or those from similar academic disciplines is that only a small minority of wars are religious wars, although I think that is viewing religious warfare in a narrower sense than I do as a subset of psychological warfare.

 

RATING: 5 STARS*****

S-TIER (GOD TIER – WHAT ELSE?)

Top Tens – History: Top 10 Wars (Special Mention: Revised) (3) American Revolutionary War & American Civil War

Posted on by

 

Washington Crossing the Delaware by Emanuel Leutze, 1851 (public domain image)

 

(3) AMERICAN REVOLUTIONARY WAR & AMERICAN CIVIL WAR (1775-1783 & 1861-1865)

 

That’s right – two wars for the price of one in this special mention, the American Revolutionary War (1775-1783) and the American Civil War (1861-1865). Also two wars that could be described as the commencement of modern history – and certainly of the predominant superpower of modern history, the United States.

These two wars earn their special entry mention for a number of reasons – firstly as representative of those categories of war that deserve (and will get) their own top ten (and special mentions), revolutions and civil wars.

Of course, those two categories tend to be overlapping, as revolutions tend to evolve (or devolve) into civil wars – that is, if they don’t start out that way. For that matter, we often forget the American revolution was itself a civil war between British subjects – loyalists and revolutionaries.

And the American Civil War has also been seen as the unfinished business of the American Revolutionary War, with the victor of the American Revolution effectively as the South (or what Gore Vidal called the Virginian junta). Indeed, some have seen both as part of series of Anglo-American civil wars back to the English civil war. Not to mention the American Revolutionary War’s loose sequel, the War of 1812.

However, both are more than representative – each earn top entry in those categories. In large part that’s due to their iconic predominance in American history and therefore in the American popular culture that is to a large extent global popular culture.

But more so because I categorize the American Revolution as the best revolution – firstly, because it succeeded, and secondly that it did not collapse into despotism like other revolutions. Pro tip – revolutions are best when they are limited. The more radical the revolution’s goals – the more it seeks to overturn and upend – the more likely it is to fail, or worse, succeed as despotism. Also – shout-out to the American Revolution’s good fortune in its quality of leadership, particularly Washington (with his only rival in popular American reverence being its Civil War president Lincoln).

Secondly, these two wars also earn their special mention in another category of wars that will get their own Top 10 – American wars. Although in that case I do cheekily profess to rank them by their art of war – and the American Revolutionary War ranks up there with the best American wars in art of war.

In large part, that is because it is almost unique among American wars as the Americans fought it as underdogs, against the largest and most powerful maritime empire in history (of course, that is, apart from their own subsequent modern maritime empire)

And they won it through the tried and true art of war for states weaker than their adversaries (as well as Americans generally in their bigger wars) – having others do the fighting for you. In particular, the French – but also the Spanish and Dutch in what was effectively a world war against Britain.

Not so much the American Civil War of course, which was fought entirely between themselves without foreign allies or intervention – and remains, not coincidentally, the American war with the highest American casualties.

Thirdly and finally, these two wars earn their special mention for their own significant impact in history, military or otherwise.

The American Revolution looms larger here, inspiring as it did the Haitian and Latin American revolutions. And it not only inspired the French revolution, but directly led to it as the French monarchy had bankrupted itself fighting the American revolution – literally two revolutions for the price of one.

The American Revolution also not only saw the United States gain independence from the British maritime empire, but ultimately supplanting it as world power, fuelled by their territorial expansion across the continent that also originated with the American Revolution.

And perhaps Europeans – particularly Germans, who were unified under Bismarck at about the same time – might have paid more attention to the American Civil War as more indicative of the attrition, industrial mobilization and general slog-fest of modern warfare, as opposed to, say outliers like the Franco-Prussian War.

Lest we do too much cheerleading for the American revolution, let’s remember its losers, apart from the British (as well as French and Spanish) monarchy. British loyalists – many of whom fled to Canada or elsewhere. Those native Americans allied with the British or who otherwise sought to thwart the growing United States. And of course slaves and women, as the new American republic deprived both of liberty or representation, uncannily echoing classical Athenian democracy.

 

RATING: 5 STARS*****
S-TIER (GOD-TIER)

Top Tens – History: Top 10 Types of War (Special Mention) (2) Psychological Warfare

Posted on by

Photographic portrait of Sigmund Freud by Max Halberstadt in 1921 and signed by Freud – probably the most iconic image of Freud (public domain image)

 

 

(2) PSYCHOLOGICAL WARFARE

 

Psywar, psyops, military information support operations, political warfare, hearts and minds, shock and awe, show of force, propaganda, disinformation

All warfare is psychological warfare.

No, seriously.

Yes, I know the term psychological warfare is usually to connote means of targeting an adversary’s morale or collective psyche – whether of their military, civilian population, or political state (or any part or combination of those) – apart from (or adjacent to) the use of military force.

However, war has always used psychological ‘force’  (and ‘space’ or ‘time’) – such as bluff, deception and intimidation for fear and shock – as much as physical force in combat from its very origin in prehistoric or primal warfare (to the extent we can infer it from observations of more contemporary tribal warfare) or even animal intra-species conflict.

After all, it’s best to reduce your enemy’s fighting power by reducing their cohesion, discipline, morale, resilience or resistance (or alternatively increase your own) – and better yet to avoid as much fighting (or as many casualties) as possible by causing them to break altogether into desertion, flight, retreat, rout or surrender (or alternatively mobilize your own forces against such things). In short, defeating the will of your enemy.

There’s Hannibal or the Mongols using deception or subtertuge to give the impression of forces as present or to inflate the apparent size of their forces. There’s the Mongols – quite the practitioners of psychological warfare – using the carrot of leniency and the stick of annihilation to encourage surrender. There’s the use of sirens on German Stuka aircraft in WW2 for their psychological effect (as well as other uses).

Of course, it’s not always about ‘negative’ impact, reducing or breaking your enemy. It can also be about ‘positive impact’, such as enlisting them to you – although that tends to involve the more usual usage of psychological warfare against their civilian populations or political states apart from or adjacent to the use of military force.

“Psychological warfare involves the planned use of propaganda, fear, and manipulation to influence the emotions, attitudes, and behavior of an opposition group, without relying on physical force. Its primary goal is to break an enemy’s will to fight, undermine morale, and cause confusion.”

Tactics of psychological warfare – particularly in the usual sense of not involving military force – include propaganda, disinformation or deception, demoralization and intimidation.

“The term is used to denote any action which is practiced mainly by psychological methods with the aim of evoking a planned psychological reaction in other people” – “various techniques aimed at influencing a target audience’s value system, belief system, emotions, motives, reasoning, or behavior.”

 

RATING:

S-TIER (GOD TIER)

Top Tens – History: Top 10 Wars (Special Mention: Revised) (2) Crusades

Posted on by

 

Richard the Lionheart on his way to Jerusalem by James William Glass, 1850 (public domain image)

 

(2) CRUSADES

 

The Crusades – giving religious warfare a bad name for a millennium!

But seriously, the Crusades had everything – not surprisingly, as they took place at the crossroads (heh) of history, three continents and three major world faiths (with almost every variant of sect and some other faiths thrown in).

There’s the Crusades themselves, from which there are a number to choose. Eight or nine of them, counting the more formal crusades identified as such in the Middle East (by subsequent historians), but not counting all the pseudo-crusades or quasi-crusades in the Middle East and elsewhere, as well as weird and generally disastrous spinoffs such as the People’s Crusade or the Children’s Crusade. If you throw in things like the Reconquista of the Iberian peninsula, Northern Crusades, crusades against heretics like the Albigensian or Cathar Crusade – “kill them all and let God sort them out” – and the crusading rhetoric of the Ottoman Wars, then you could easily compile a Top 10 Crusades.

There’s the wider theme of religious warfare, beyond the crusades to other wars, exemplified by wars fought by, between or within monotheistic religions, such as the wars fought as part of the Protestant Reformation. That theme arguably also extends to wars of modern political ideology or moral causes, including religious or ideological terrorism. It’s not without reason Eisenhower called his memoirs of the Second World War “Crusade in Europe”.

And there’s the metaphorical use of crusade – as well as analogous forms of crusading movements – for ideological, moral or social movements, and the paradigm of crusading as a metaphor for military or political campaigns fought for a belief or ideal.

Back to the more formal Crusades in the Middle East, on the European or ‘Western’ side, you have the Roman Empire coming together, in both its major western and eastern successors – the Catholic Church represented by the Pope in Rome answering the call for aid of the eastern Roman empire, which history disguises as the Byzantine Empire but I’ll use here for convenience of nomenclature.

And answer the call they did, most famously with the knights of military orders – with my favorite the Templars or Knights Templar, which became rich and powerful, but ultimately ran afoul of the French monarchy and the Pope. Also worshipping Baphomet if you believe the medieval gossip.

Of course, the Crusaders were styled more as the Holy Roman Empire, or the founders of that empire, the Franks (despite the Franks increasingly being, you know, French) – and indeed Europeans in general continue to be called some derivative of the term Frank throughout Asia even today.

There were also Vikings or rather their adventurous successors, the Normans. And you can throw in those scheming Venetians, who ultimately succeeded in diverting the Fourth Crusade to attack their rival, the Byzantine Empire itself (whose claims to the Holy Land were conveniently forgotten by the Crusaders).

That was to prove one of the most short-sighted schemes of history, fatally wounding the empire that had long stood as the southern bulwark of Europe against Islamic invasion. Do you want Ottomans besieging Vienna? Because that’s how you get Ottomans besieging Vienna. Twice.

And on the ‘Eastern’ side, you have a whole host of Islamic combatants, kicked off by the Seljuk Turks taking most of what is now known as Turkey from the Byzantine Empire (leading to that call for aid that started the whole Crusades), but most famously personified by Saladin (albeit he was of Kurdish ethnicity).

My favorite in the whole Crusades remains the Order of Assassins, who derived their name from the hashish with which their founder Hassan al-Sabbah doped them up and who in turn lent their name to our term for assassins.

Lacking the force for more conventional military campaigns, the Assassins focused on – you guessed it – targeted assassination as they infiltrated everyone, Muslim or Christian, until they were defeated by an enemy that came from too far away to have been infiltrated, the Mongols.

That’s right, the Mongols pop up in the Crusades, as they popped up virtually everywhere at that time. Even more interestingly, the Crusaders and Byzantines sought out the Mongols as allies against the Muslims.

This lent itself to the legend of Prester John, a mysterious Christian sovereign whose kingdom moved about Asia and Africa, much like the land of the Phantom – playing its part, as the Crusades did in general, in subsequent European maritime exploration and empire.

 

RATING: 5 STARS****

S-TIER (WHAT ELSE? GOD TIER!)

 

Top Tens – History: Top 10 Types of War (Special Mention) (1) Prehistoric & Primal Warfare

Posted on by

Cave painting of a battle between archers, Morella la Vella, Spain – public domain image used in Wikipedia “Prehistoric Warfare”

 

 

(1) PREHISTORIC & PRIMAL WARFARE

 

Hobbes vs Rousseau – the Hobbesian state of nature or “the war of all against all” (bellum omnium contra omnes) as against Rousseau’s more noble savage state of nature.

Sadly this special mention is not for some Great Prehistoric War fought between mammoth cavalry and evil Atlantean overlords in the style of the film 10,000 BC – or a tyrannosaur-riding Neanderthal fighting off everything in the style of the Primal animated TV series, although that series seems closer to Hobbes’ state of nature.

It’s for the sheer timescale of prehistoric war compared to historic war, corresponding to the scale of prehistory in general compared to history – 98% or so of the entire span of humanity on this planet so far, all but the last 5,000 years or so out of 300,000 years. And prehistory only gets longer if you throw in our hominin ancestor species as humanity, which potentially lengthens that span to 3,000,000 years.

There’s also that prehistory didn’t just disappear with the advent of recorded history – or rather didn’t consistently disappear across time and place, instead enduring in places more remote from recorded history until the modern period. And prehistoric war hasn’t even ended now, hence the better description would be primal war – as a type of war, exemplified by ambush and raid, to which humanity regularly returns, atavistically time and time again.

Most fundamentally, there’s Hobbes vs Rousseau – the philosophical significance of prehistoric war in understanding the origins of war itself.

Of course, the origins of war in prehistory is the subject of theory or outright speculation, as by its nature prehistory involves those human societies without recorded history – typically Neolithic or Paleolithic, but potentially also more recent societies without written historical records.

It’s where prehistory meets philosophy, hence the opening dialectic of Hobbes versus Rousseau – the ongoing debate over human nature and violence or war. “The existence — and even the definition — of war in humanity’s hypothetical state of nature has been a controversial topic in the history of ideas”.

Philosopher Thomas Hobbes famously proposed that the original “state of nature” of humanity (or human nature) was inherently violent – the war of all against all in which “the life of man” is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short”. Against that, philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau also famously proposed a more idealistic and idyllic state of nature as more free and peaceful – subsequently styled as that of the “noble savage” – made unequal and violent by “civilized” society.

That debate over human nature continues, not least in speculation or theories of prehistoric war, “spanning contemporary anthropology, archaeology, ethnography, history, political science, psychology, primatology, and philosophy in such divergent books as Azar Gat’s War in Human Civilization and Raymond C. Kelly’s Warless Societies and the Origin of War.”

Essentially, it boils down to those who argue for prehistoric war and violence, potentially at even higher rates than those in recorded history, and those who argue for more peaceful prehistory.

To put it that simply, however, removes all context or nuance from a debate that is much more balanced or varied, reflecting a more complex situation – that prehistory was both more violent than asserted by proponents of prehistoric pacifism and also more pacific than asserted by prehistoric warmongers.

Most concede that violence or war in human prehistory was highly variable between different societies at different times in different places or circumstances. Some societies were notoriously warlike, such as the Maori of New Zealand, the Yanomami (dubbed “the Fierce People”) of the Amazon or the inter-tribal warfare in Papua New Guinea.

On the one hand, archaeological studies of human remains from prehistory have suggested a higher rate for violent injury and death substantially above those in recorded history. One interesting feature is that a recurring motive for inter-tribal warfare is raiding for nubile women – as with the Yanomami, suggesting that the legendary motive for the Trojan War may not be so far removed from the historic or prehistoric truth.

On the other hand, depictions of human violence or war is comparatively rare until relatively recently in prehistoric art. Proponents of prehistoric pacificism persuasively suggest that low population density among prehistoric tribal hunter-gatherers – and the potential costly nature of violence between them – both allowed for and pushed towards avoiding conflict, typically by migration.

Another issue is that even if or where Paleolithic societies were violent, the scale of that violence was necessarily limited or disorganized – in the nature of feuds and raids or ambushes and skirmishes. Some argue for what is termed endemic warfare – in which “war is often ritualized with a number of taboos and practices that limit the number of casualties and the duration of the conflict”. Of course, endemic warfare could readily escalate into actual warfare without such limits.

Others have also asserted various historic or prehistoric event horizons that saw the escalation of war. One such is the development of missile weapons such as bows or slings allowing for less risk than melee combat. Another more commonly argued one is the horizon between the Paleolithic and Neolithic – with the increased sedentism from agriculture in the Neolithic seeing a corresponding increase in the intensity of scale in war.

One obvious model for theories of prehistoric war is more recent or contemporary tribal warfare. And one could argue that tribal war remains the predominant model for war in general – that most wars in history are tribal wars at heart.