There Won't Be War

Introduction

Just before this book went to print, I turned to my oldest daughter, Annie, who was sitting beside me in the car, and asked her:

“Would you read a book about peace?”

She hesitated, that cautious look that eleven-year-olds often have in her eye. “I don’t know ...”

I thought I understood and I said: “Because it might not be exciting enough?”

“No ... I’m wondering what it would be about, Daddy.”

“What do you mean?”

“What would the book really be about?”

I lied. “About a peaceful world, I guess—people living in harmony, getting along, respecting one another.”

There was a long pause. “I’d rather,” she said at last, “read about how we got there. How we made a world like that ....”

This from an eleven-year-old. Maybe there’s hope after all.

“Thank you,” I said. “That’s exactly what my good friend Harry and I have put together—a book about the struggle for peace, not peace itself. I do hope you like k.”

I’d been expecting, as Harry knows, the reaction of so many adult readers to peace—or for that matter, to Utopias, those perfect societies we keep making in fiction that somehow never ring quite true: “Why would I want to read about perfect harmony?” we hear. “There’s no conflict, no drama. It’s boring, isn’t it?”

No, it isn’t. It’s actually the most exciting idea in the world. But far too many people just don’t think peace is possible. We don’t believe that human beings—by their nature—can achieve harmony, can reach everlasting peace on a global (let alone a domestic or personal) scale. Looking Backward, that 19th Century Utopia that invented credit cards, feels like an essay, reads like a joke—while Brave New World, Nineteen Eighty-Four and Anthem, all of those antiutopies we keep on reading decade after decade, somehow feel more real to us ... truer.

Is it simply that we believe a vision of global peace denies what makes us human, and is therefore a lie—or is it that, in historical terms (no matter how many interludes of peace we’ve had over the millennia) we’ve always known war, and fiction must echo that “reality”? Is it that, as human beings, we’re doomed never to make everlasting peace—or is it simply that we distrust ourselves, that we’re cynical, the way any idealist who very much wants something and never gets it in life becomes cynical—though indeed we do have the potential to make peace?

The latter is more hopeful certainly.

Even with Gorbachev and glasnost and the opening of Eastern Europe, we remain distrustful. It’s a lie, a temporary fantasy, a Soviet manipulation, at best an attempt that will fail. Perhaps because to assume otherwise—to have faith in our own best nature as intelligent, caring human beings—may set us up for disappointment once again in the long history of the world?

That very distrust, however—that cynicism, as we continue to dream our dreams of peace—may tell us more about what it means to be human than we realize.

It may tell us that there is indeed hope ... because, though we stumble, though we fear and distrust and are disappointed, we keep on dreaming. The dream, though we often misuse it, pulls us on. The dream within us is as real as our failure historically to reach it, and in turn must therefore be a “reality” deep within our neural wiring that good fiction should, must, and always will address as well.

When an eleven-year-old prefers reading about how we can get there, there is indeed hope. She could have said: “I'd rather read about perfect harmony, Daddy—I don’t care how we get there.” And that would have been hideous, wouldn’t it.

There’s hope too, because, boring though the thought of peaceful fiction may be to readers who prefer hostaged submarines or Cold War assassinations, you, dear reader, did pick this book up.

You must have had a reason.

What you’re holding is a book about the struggle for peace—about what it means to be human, about how an honest, thoughtful recognition of what we are as human beings can show us the way toward a real peace. Not an easily dreamt peace, no—not one where men and women lie down lobotomized in the garden of Eden with lambs and lions and somehow, in the process, lose their very humanity—but a peace achieved in the face of their humanity ... apples, serpents, fear, rage, prejudice, and all. Intelligence is the key, of course—but so are trust, compassion, respect, and a very real recognition of the paradoxes, the conflicts within us, that make us human. The struggle isn’t easy, but then it shouldn’t be: a peace without struggle is no real human victory. Nothing in life is. That’s one of the things that makes us human ....

When we conceived of this book in 1988, we knew we wanted it to illuminate the two major lies, the illusions, that drive us so often, that have, in fact, undermined peace for millennia now. We also, of course, wanted it to be a celebration of the best within humankind—rationality, respect, social cooperation, and, of course, the ability to dream a better world that the one we’ve so far made.

What are these two lies—these illusions—that for so long have done their best to keep us from a real peace where we can still remain human? One is certainly the glory of war. It offers us cheaply, but with tragic results, a sense of power in the face of that 20th Century helplessness and powerlessness we hear so much about. War is about the power that fear demands of us, isn’t it? Power, after all (the lie assures us), is what the world is really about, isn’t it? The meek are fools. The reasonable are suckers. If you really believe in your country, your family, your values, you will wage war to protect them—because there is indeed an Enemy out there and the Enemy, like a host of fallen angels, is out to destroy everything you value. By waging war you’ll be redeemed by war’s very violence, won’t you? The consequences of this are of course terrible: The perpetuation of Power Uber Alles, of war itself, of the assumption that whether we win or lose our submission to Power redeems us.

The other lie is trickier still. It looks so good to us. It is, very simply, the daydream of Eden, and what could possibly be wrong with that (though even an eleven-year-old may see through it when many grown-ups do not)? If we will, in the end, forge a peace, despite the darker regions of our nature, because we dream of peace, what could possibly be wrong with dreaming? A lot. If we daydream—with the help of the religions we may subscribe to, or out of our own sense of powerlessness in the world—a perfect Eden on earth (or everafter), we’re able to escape the misery here. If we daydream it, we free ourselves from the here-and-now. The dream fixes everything—like a needle, a pill, a designer opiate. The consequences of this, too, are just as tragic: By daydreaming, by assuming we have no power (or responsibility, or right) to change the world, to work hard at changing it—by assuming all will be made right after this life, at the hand of Someone else, in a Finer Place, or by assuming that the struggle is meaningless (a religion of its own nihilistic kind) we avoid struggling with our own humanity, with our own contradictions, to make something better here on earth. We tell ourselves by the daydream that we’re good, but we do nothing to reach the dream. By daydreaming—by relinquishing the power we do have, through intelligence and reason and commitment, in the world—we avoid earning the very thing we have wanted so very much, for so very long, in our finest dreams.

Which is the more evil lie? It’s very hard to tell. But unless we look them both squarely in the face, we’ll never beat them.

Thanks to the storytelling gifts and brains of some of the best science fiction writers today—the Big Names we all grew up with as well as the newer, gifted, award-winning writers who will take their places in the decades to come—Harry and I are indeed able to give the very book we’d hoped for ... and then some. Ferocious satires by Isaac Asimov, Robert Sheckley, William Tenn, Gregory Frost, Nicholas Emmett, Ratislav Durman and Frederik Pohl. Economic warfare—and peace-making—stories by Charles Stross, Jack C. Haldeman II, and Timothy Zahn. Mythic fantasies by Jack McDevitt and Marc Laidlaw. An alternate universe by Kim Stanley Robinson. Human stories by Nancy Collins, George Zebrowski, J. G. Ballard, James Morrow, and Joe Haldeman. An international collection as varied as you’ll find. Eighteen visions of what we are and what we might become, on our way through war (and our own human nature) ... toward a real Peace. A celebration of what makes us human—at our best. And a warning of the pitfalls that have always done their best to keep us from what we might, out of our best dreams, make of this world.

And no, it won’t be boring. Like human nature itself, the best science fiction never is.

—Bruce McAllister