Life During Wartime

Author: Lucius Shepard

In June 1968, the magazine Galaxy carried two advertisements on facing pages. The left-hand page declared support for the Vietnam War and was signed by 72 prominent sf authors and editors; the right-hand page opposed the war and was signed by 82 people. The war divided science fiction every bit as much as it divided American society as a whole. But although an occasional science fiction story was clearly influenced by the war (The Forever War by Joe Haldeman is the prime example), it would not be until Lucius Shepard started writing, getting on for 20 years later, that a body of work was produced directly addressing the traumas of Vietnam.Of these, easily the best was the novel Life During Wartime. Here the setting has been transposed to Central America in the near future, but the intense heat of the jungle, the disorientation experienced by the soldiers, blatantly recalls Vietnam.The American soldiers know nothing of why they are fighting or what the war is about; they know even less about the people whose lands they have invaded. Most of the soldiers, most of the time, are high on drugs which are not just freely available, they are actually distributed by the military. Meanwhile the elite forces, such as the helicopter pilots we meet on several occasions, are so engaged with their heads-up digital displays that they are completely dissociated from the real world around them. This is high-tech, very science fictional warfare.Their opponents, however, are effectively magic realist; at one point an American pilot is killed when he is suffocated by hundreds of butterflies. The central character, David Mingolla, is an artillery specialist recruited into Psicorps, but when he meets and falls in love with the rebel Debora the two go AWOL, penetrating the Latin American jungle to discover that the whole war is actually a continuation of an ages-old rivalry between two Panamanian families, who have managed to manipulate the different armies to their will. "R&R", the novella which became the starting point for the novel, won the Nebula Award. The novel, atmospheric with a vivid sense of how oppressive the jungle can feel, is surely one of the finest accounts of the experience of war that science fiction has produced.

Similar Recommendations

Shepard's great strengths as a writer, the colour and feel and smell of the jungle, the way that characters barely hang on to their sense of identity in the face of mysterious and overwhelming threat, the vivid image of the world as a place where people don't really belong, is often best displayed in his novellas and novelettes. So you are well advised to look out for his collections, such as The Jaguar Hunter which includes such classics as "The Jaguar Hunter", "Salvador" and "A Spanish Lesson".

A good place to start would be The Best of Lucius Shepard, a patchy collection that doesn't always live up to the title, but stories like "Shades", "Delta Sly Honey", "Radiant Green Star", "The Arcevoalo", "Jailwise" and "Stars Seen Through Stone" all display how brilliant Shepard could be at his very best.