There Won't Be War

(She gazes at the screen, then flicks the remote controller and the screen goes blank. All is black. The only thing we see is Jane herself, alone and brightly lit on the empty stage. She puts on her helmet, but before she closes it she adds:)

There aren’t enough of us left for anything else.

Afterword: The End of War

There was a time when science fiction writers seemed to be inventing all of the new ideas. Youthful SF readers in the thirties were inspired to become rocket engineers—then went on to build the rockets that up to then had existed only in fiction. Atomic power and, unhappily, atom bombs were science fiction commonplaces, along with television, personal radios, and many other devices and concepts too numerous to mention; many of which exist today. It is however the regrettable fact that in recent times SF invention has given way to a rather mindless repetition that produces uninspired copies of copies of Tolkien, rehashes of ancient plots strung out in mind-numbing volumes. Even more depressing are the military-minded writers, and even publishers, who consider war to be a Good Thing, almost a commonplace event. They tell us over and over again that violent conflict and destruction will be with us forever. The idea that there will always be war is an abomination and an insult to human intelligence. War is about fear and death—and nothing else. Those who write about the glories of future conflict are writing the pornography of war.

This volume is an attempt to correct that false assumption, to balance negative with positive. The most imaginative science fiction writer today is named Gorbachev. He invented a story plot called Glasnost and Perestroika—he made the story come true. No other SF writer ever managed to produce a story with such daring and novel concepts.

The authors of the stories in this anthology have risen to Gorbachev’s challenge. All of them are aware of that very simple yet tremendously vital concept:

We are what we think we are.

External reality is created by internal opinion, attitude and prejudice.

The Cold War is now over—though many politicians still need to be convinced of that fact. It began as a state of mind, grew strong as it fed on fear and greed, until it became a monster that divided the world, fanned prejudices, bred war machines that impoverished us all. There never was a physical threat—no matter what the Cold Warriors told us with their fictional theories of Domino Effects, “lost” countries, Evil Empires.

Stalin’s paranoid fear of the threat of invasion had a basis in reality. He was well aware that Napoleon had invaded Russia and had been turned back only with the greatest difficulty and loss of life. He was there when Russia was invaded by America, Britain and other western countries at the end of the First World War, when the Allies fought on the side of the Whites during the revolution. He rose to power fighting the invading Germans in the Second World War. He believed, and proved to his own satisfaction, that force was the answer to every problem. He murdered his enemies, and those he believed to be his enemies, filling the Gulags as well. When the Soviet forces drove the German invaders back to Berlin he saw to it that all of the Soviet occupied countries had communist governments—whether they wanted them or no—to act as a buffer against any future invasions from the west.

The right-wing politicians of the west responded to the “threat” with enthusiastic paranoia of their own. The Red Beast was coming and had to be restrained. Capitalists have always seen socialists as a threat to their very existence—completly ignoring the fact that Marx was wrong and there is no eternal war between the classes. Socialism and capitalism have blended quite happily in Scandinavia for decades. Despite the fact that the exhausted Soviet Union not only had no desire to invade Western Europe, but was physically incapable of doing so, the Cold War began. What a boon for the armament industries this was! America became a socialist country at last—although the benefactors were these big business that produced the weaponry, not the people. So it began.

And now it has ended. Yet nostalgia still exists for those bad old days. Stalin the murderer is a hero in Georgia. Lawrence Eagleburger believes that “For all its risks and uncertainties, the Cold War was characterized by a remarkably stable and predictable set of relations among the great powers.” Oh, really. The fear that I and all of the world felt during the Cuban missile crisis—to take a single example—was imaginary?