The fantasy of warfare
Photo by Brian McGowan on Unsplash
I’ve seen my fair share of student excuses for turning in late assignments, but one excuse from a few weeks ago gave me pause. In asking for an extension, a student cited an intense increase in their anxiety because, in their words: It feels like World War 3 is happening and I’m so scared.
It would’ve been easy for me, in my pause, to put on my admin hat and dismiss their reason as insufficient. My first thought was to wonder if they had relatives in Ukraine or any other sort of connection to Russia’s ongoing invasion of the country. But it was this question, I think, that caused me to pivot, to ask myself: Do they need to have relatives to be concerned and afraid?
The answer is no, because this is how war functions: it leaves its imprint on all witnesses, even those without physical proximity to it.
In the wake of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and the realities and casualties of that invasion (amongst other more silent ones, like Yemen’s), I’ve been thinking about what our responsibilities are as artists in our depictions of warfare in our stories. I’ve been wondering:
How may we move further away from sensationalizing the depiction of battles as “exciting” and discuss the less peeked-at parts of the effects of war and violence (outside of the also sensationalized depictions of suffering, displacement and despondence)?
It turns out I’d already been thinking about this for a while, because sometime late last year, I tweeted this:
Other authors of fantasy and speculative narratives have been thinking about this too. Fellow Orbit author C.L. Clark wrote about this in Fantasy Magazine just last year, and more stories in recent times have attempted to engage with this, like C.L. Clark’s The Unbroken, R.F. Kuang’s The Poppy War, Seth Dickinson’s The Traitor Baru Cormorant, etc.
So it’s not that we don’t understand or agree that war is a complex endeavor with a multifold range of stakeholders and victims, and that the big battles we see play out on our screens and pages are but a slice of that whole rotten pie. It’s that we wonder how we may tell these stories in ways that better serve our readers and the world at large, without sacrificing empathy and nuance on the altar of excitement.
Because let’s face it: whether storyteller or story receiver, we’ve been fascinated by stories of war for a long time. The depiction of large-scale battles or “heroes” and “legends” standing up against hordes of “evil attackers” and hopefully defeating them “for the greater good” did not just begin with Tolkien or GRR Martin. But what we must pay notice to as contemporary authors in 2022 are the terms I have placed in quotes in that last sentence. We must understand our responsibility as storytellers, that no matter the story we tell, we are presenting our story receivers with impressions of what good and evil are, who are the heroes, legends and villains, and who we suggest they root for over the other.
My approach in The Nameless Republic
When I set out to write The Nameless Republic trilogy, one of the first things I told myself was that I would never glorify battles and violence that harmed a large swathe of people. I wasn’t just thinking about those hordes who would die on the battlefield in defence or pursuit of someone else's dream, but those tucked into the clothfolds of war, away from the big action and exciting sequences. The farmer who's forced to pay higher taxes to fund weaponry. The transporter who has to give up their carts in service of the military. Those who are forced to migrate and leave everything they own behind just to survive. Those far away, sleepless, wondering if they’ll be the next to be invaded. I thought of this quote from Satti in Warrior of the Wind (yes, you are getting an early peek now!):
“I’ve always thought peace was not the absence of war or violence, but the presence of one so silent it makes no sound.”
I have never witnessed war like this, but my father, a survivor of the Nigerian Civil War (1967-1970) told me stories of his family sleeping in forests whenever either the Nigerian or Biafran army marched through their town. He was not one of those on either side of the Nigerian state’s clampdown on the secessionist state of Biafra, but a midwesterner simply caught in the middle, the grass that suffered the elephants’ stomps. When I thought about what kind of story I would like Son of the Storm to be (and Warrior of the Wind, now that I’ve finished it, hurray), I thought of him.
Now, as I begin to plot and outline the final book in the series, which sees more warfare than the first two, I'm holding in my head, hands and heart, those who suffer the repercussions of warring decisions made by others. I'm thinking about their descendants and what they will have to carry in their hearts forever, only whispering memories of the war, if they ever speak of it at all.
This is to say that soft touches and a dexterous hand are required to offer the nuance and complexity that narratives of warfare deserve. Us fantasy and science fiction writers, whose stories are rife with such depictions of warfare, must pay special attention to this, especially as the real-life implications of war stare back at us from our myriad of screens. We do not want readers to turn away from reality and seek only the “fun” and “exciting” parts of war (yuck) in simplistic, sanitized versions of battles in our stories. As authors, it is our duty to resist presenting that option. Not if we can help it.
