Hope someone can help me with this. I’m doing some research (at the moment just for fun) into science fiction stories and movies that reflect a pro-gun and/or anti-‘peacnik’ stand. I know there are probably lots of stories that would fit that description, but I’m most keen to find a story that I once saw referred to where an alien civilization shows mankind the error of its ways in being violent (particularly in having violent toys for children), and turns the world into a pacifist paradise … the punchline being that the aliens then invade earth without any resistance, as nobody knows how to use weapons, etc.
Firstly, I apologise if I’ve messed up details of the story, or even misrepresented its political angle, as I’m basing it on a summary I read a couple of years ago in a political opinion piece. Anyone help with this?
Starship Troopers is about having a strong military and a future society where citizenship is earned by serving in it. At least the movie was – I haven’t read the book, but I doubt it could possibly be as good as the movie.
Your descriptions sounds a bit like the alternate universe episodes of DS9 where the the barbaric humans Spock teachers to be civilize and later they are made into slaves by more violent aliens.
Also it sounds like the Man-Kzin War stories by Larry Niven.
I promise I am not whooshing you. Had a really fun time watching the movie, but never read the book and don’t really care to. I like sci-fi when blended with stuff like action, horror, noir, or even Westerns, but I’m usually bored to tears by “science fiction.”
The original Battlestar Galactica has plenty of these “deluded peacenik” moments, wherein Adama struggles to deal with a civilian government determined to believe that if mankind just disbands its military, destroys all its weapons, and settles on a planet of man-eating insects, maybe the Cylons will be nice to us.
You could live without it. At the very least, reading the book makes some parts of the movie a lot clearer, including that early classroom conversation on the difference between a citizen and a civilian. The screenwriter threw just enough of these elements in, I think, to conform to some contract that the movie make a token effort to have something in common with the book, else they’d lose rights to the title.
The book is interesting, though parts of it are sexist and wildly dated, reading like a junior officer’s protocol manual, 1951.
As parodied in the Simpsons … well, I don’t think it’s that, because the description I have in my mind focusses on the non-violent nature of humanity, and particularly the toys that children play with being non-violent. I’m not sure whether I should win a prize for stumping the Dopers, or be put away for hallucinating the whole thing
I’m pretty sure there is more anti-war SF than there is militaristic, and I’m also pretty sure that most readable militaristic (that is, respecting the value of the military instead of hoping we’ll ‘evolve beyond’ our need for it) SF was written by Heinlein.
Heh. Roddenberry probably would not have approved.
I vaguely remember a short story similar to that mentioned by the OP, dating back to the '60s or so. Don’t remember the author or title, though, alas.
The plot:
A man stumbles into a lab where he finds a time machine. He decides to go back and change human history at every major turning point, going farther and farther into the past. The two incidents I remember are him giving Napoleon an embolism, and giving the first caveman a stomachache after he eats meat, so that all of humanity thereafter would be vegetarians. Then the time traveler returns to the “present,” where he finds, to his smug self-satisfaction, a peaceful Earth filled with people living in small villages and farming.
The last line of the story is something like, “When the [alien name] attack cruisers emerged from hyperspace two weeks later, they found an Earth ripe for the taking.”
Arthur C. Clarke’s “Childhood’s End” is also roughly similar to what the OP mentioned, but not exactly. Humanity is offered peace, prosperity, plenty, etc., but must agree to forego space exploration forever. Not having much choice with giant alien ships poised over every major cities (an image ripped off by “Independence Day”), humanity agrees.
The aliens have an ulterior motive, true, but it’s not conquest of the Earth.
One of the most well-known set of pro-gun Science Fiction short stories were the The Weapon Shop of Isher series, by A. E. van Vogt. It was written in the 1940s, which as far as I know was long before anti-gun rhetoric caught on in the U.S…
I’d suggest Larry Niven’s short story Cloak of Anarchy. While it’s not expressly pro-gun/anti-peacenik, it is an answer to the idea of a anarchy as a stable government.
For a more modern pro-gun/anti-peacenik book, you might like to read John Ringo’s Ghost. I warn you, however, it’s been called carnographic porn. (By the author, IIRC.) Not a warm-fuzzy book. Of course, as this is the writer behind the whole Posleen series of books… this isn’t surprising.
