Deserts of Fire Read online

  Also by Douglas Lain

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  In the Shadow of the Towers: Speculative Fiction in a Post-9/11 World

  Copyright © 2016 by Douglas Lain

  All Rights Reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without the express written consent of the publisher, except in the case of brief excerpts in critical reviews or articles. All inquiries should be addressed to Night Shade Books, 307 West 36th Street, 11th Floor, New York, NY 10018.

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.

  Print ISBN: 978-1-59780-852-1

  Ebook ISBN: 978-1-59780-861-3

  Cover illustration by Richie Pope

  Cover design by Lesley Worrell

  Please see pages 352—353 for an extension of this copyright page.

  Printed in the United States of America

  contents

  Introduction

  Vietnam Syndrome

  “The Big Flash”—Norman Spinrad

  “The Village”—Kate Wilhelm

  Terrorism

  “The Frozen One”—Tim Pratt

  “The Language of Monsters”—Michael Canfield

  “In the Loop”—Ken Liu

  “Wasps/Spiders”—Brendan C. Byrne

  Weapons of Mass Destruction

  “Text of Colin Powell’s Speech to the UN Security Council Cut Up with Regret”—Anonymous

  “The Seventh Expression of the Robot General”—Jeffrey Ford

  Shock, Awe, and Combat

  “Over Here”—Ray Vukcevich

  “Shaytan, the Whisperer”—Pedro Iniguez

  “Five Good Things about Meghan Sheedy”—A. M. Dellamonica

  “The People We Kill”—Audrey Carroll

  “Light and Shadow”—Linda Nagata

  Mission Accomplished

  “Winnebago Brave”—Rob McCleary

  “Seeing Double”—Ray Daley

  Life After Wartime?

  “Sealed”—Robert Morgan Fisher

  “Unzipped”—Steven J. Dines

  “The Sun Inside”—David J. Schwartz

  Excerpt from Corrosion—Jon Bassoff

  War Is Over?

  “Noam Chomsky and the Time Box”—Douglas Lain

  “Arms and the Woman”—James Morrow

  Copyright Acknowledgements

  introduction

  deserts of Fire is a collection of stories that, taken together, might be read as a simple statement against war, and specifically a statement against the US incursions in the Middle East. However, to read the stories in this collection that way is to miss a deeper point.

  Nobody, regardless of ideology or political persuasion, likes war. Everyone wants to be rid of it … at least in principle. Yet, the wars continue to stack up and nobody quite knows why. To take just one not-too-far-off example, we can look to Iraq.

  The official rationales given for the invasion of Iraq in 2003 were quickly revealed as untrue … either before the invasion or by subsequent revelations. No evidence of WMDs was discovered. There was no evidence linking Saddam Hussein to al-Qaeda. Humanitarian justifications for war were disputed prior to the invasion by groups like Amnesty International, and lost all credibility after the invasion when the routine torture of Iraqi prisoners by US military guards became public knowledge.

  But even the reasons suggested by critics of the war—explanations revolving around self-interest and suggestions that it was all about oil profits or political hegemony in the region—didn’t stand up. The vast majority of the oil contracts did not go to US companies, and US prestige and influence in the region and in the wider world have diminished dramatically in the wake of the invasion. The sad fact is that nobody knows why the US invaded Iraq. The sad fact is that the invasion of Iraq was absurd. And this is why, when these stories are taken together, no simple anti-war sentiment will be found in this book.

  One great critic of war, the sometimes science-fiction writer Kurt Vonnegut, once wrote that “civilization ended in World War I,” and in his definitive novel Slaughterhouse Five, one of his characters claimed that the reason wars kept coming even after the Great War was that novels and movies romanticized war efforts. Wars kept coming because too many people wrote stories that make “war look just wonderful.”

  These two ideas—that World War I was the death of civilization and that fictional acts of war heroism cause us to fight more wars—are connected even if they do not, at first, appear to be. Both believing that civilization did or should end because of the horrors of war, and blaming fiction for perpetuating war make the same mistake: of blaming the human imagination for war… .

  A hundred years ago, in Zurich, a group of artists thought in the same way as Vonnegut. They wanted to reject all heroism, all pretenses of human achievement or greatness, because it was this sort of pretension that produced the monstrosity known as the machine gun. One of these artists, a veteran of the Great War named Tristan Tzara, wrote the group’s manifesto. In it he claimed that this new art movement, born of the trenches, was aimed at total independence. It was called Dada. Tzara explained that this art was given that name because the word Dada had no discernible meaning.

  Dada was meaningless because Dada renounced all systems. Dada rejected all efforts towards rational understanding, and in this way Dada echoed (and maybe even reproduced) the chaos and meaninglessness of the war that it wanted to reject.

  Today’s genre fiction, even the most bizarre strands of it, by its very nature as genre fiction, dismisses this rejection of systems. Instead of retreating into the acceptance of the arbitrary and embracing obscurity, today’s writers of sci-fi and horror are optimists of a sort. They don’t claim to understand war and its persistence; but they feel obligated to at least try to understand it in small and discernable ways. They’ll often (or perhaps always) fail, but each time they do so, they do so in a better and more useful way.

  What you’ll find in this book are stories written both after and during some of the wars in question. These stories represent efforts to answer the question of why this keeps happening. Some of the stories are small, and focused on the personal, while others take a larger, more systemic view. Rarely do the stories herein offer definitive answers, but they are all of them good examples of effort being made. They all cast after meaning.

  Deserts of Fire is a collection that can easily be read as a mere statement against war, but it is more than that. Instead of mere sentiment, these stories react and explore the dimensions of a question. Why war?

  vietnam syndrome

  The first war with Iraq—the “Gulf War” as it was named by contemporaneous news accounts—was as mysterious and inexplicable as any war. It was a short-lived affair, and one that in retrospect appears to have mostly have taken place on television. The US relied heavily on aerial attack to get the job done, and US troops who were on the ground in Kuwait were often as reliant on CNN coverage as the civilians back home were when it came to understanding what was happening.

  The main thing was that it
was quick. Facing off against a beleaguered and exhausted Iraqi Army in Kuwait, the US-led Coalition had no difficulty expelling and then decimating the enemy. In five weeks’ time it was all over, and most in the US were jubilant. Ecstatic even.

  Some suggested that if one needed an explanation for the Gulf War, one need only look at the victory celebrations. One of those who suggested that an easy victory was itself a justification was President George Bush Sr. Speaking to the American Legislative Exchange Council, he said, “I know you share this wonderful feeling that I have, of joy in my heart…. It’s a proud day for America. And, by God, we’ve kicked the Vietnam syndrome once and for all.”

  That’s what the bombs and troops and bulldozers were deployed to destroy. We might have killed Iraqis but our real enemy was the memory of Vietnam. And apparently it had worked. The public’s reticence about US military interventions brought on by the loss of Vietnam was supposed to have disappeared. All we’d needed was a win.

  More than a decade after Bush Sr. had declared Vietnam Syndrome vanquished the disease returned. A month before the second war against Iraq (the “Iraq War” as it is now known), the US invasion in March of 2003, the world’s largest anti-war protest occurred. There were marches in over six hundred cities. The number of participants was estimated to range from eight to thirty million. People around the world painted their faces with flowers and carried protest signs. Despite the terror attacks of 9/11, despite the victory of the first Gulf War, despite CNN and Fox News, the long shadow of that old war in Vietnam was still providing the lens through which many saw the coming war.

  In the public imagination the debate about the ethics of an invasion was fought along the same battle lines that had been drawn when Laugh-In was on the air and long hair was subversive. And science-fiction and fantasy writers who took up a US war as their subject also inevitably found themselves faced with the same choices writers like Frederik Pohl and Kate Wilhelm had faced when their respective support and opposition to the war in Vietnam ran as advertisements in Galaxy magazine.

  We will begin in this collection with Vietnam. Because these stories written in reaction to that war set the terms—if not the tone or the details—of what was to come. We set the clock back forty years, to the anti-war fiction of the past, because even as the Vietnam syndrome continues, so too do the wars.

  In 2014 the novelist and columnist Paul Di Filippo wondered what the hold-up was with regard to Norman Spinrad’s SFWA Grandmaster Award, but then realized that Spinrad was perhaps too much of a rebel for it. Awarding him the Grandmaster would be like “sitting the court jester on the throne.” Spinrad was one of the more controversial writers in SF’s New Wave movement back in the ’70s and his novel Bug Jack Barron was banned by newstands when it appeared as a serial in New Worlds. His first fiction sale for professional publication was to Harlan Ellison’s legendary anthology Dangerous Visions.

  Since the days of dangerous visions, Spinrad has written and published over twenty novels including Bug Jack Barron, The Iron Dream, The Druid King, and Osama the Gun. His story “The Big Flash” was originally published in Damon Knight’s anthology Orbit in 1969 and was nominated for a Nebula in 1970.

  “the big flash”

  NORMAN SPINRAD

  t minus 200 days … and counting… .

  They came on freaky for my taste—but that’s the name of the game: freaky means a draw in the rock business. And if the Mandala was going to survive in LA, competing with a network-owned joint like the American Dream, I’d just have to hold my nose and out-freak the opposition. So after I had dug the Four Horsemen for about an hour, I took them into my office to talk turkey.

  I sat down behind my Salvation Army desk (the Mandala is the world’s most expensive shoestring operation) and the Horsemen sat down on the bridge chairs sequentially, establishing the group’s pecking order.

  First the head honcho, lead guitar, and singer, Stony Clarke—blond shoulder-length hair, eyes like something in a morgue when he took off his steel-rimmed shades, a reputation as a heavy acid-head, and the look of a speed-freak behind it. Then Hair, the drummer, dressed like a Hell’s Angel, swastikas and all, a junkie, with fanatic eyes that were a little too close together, making me wonder whether he wore swastikas because he grooved behind the Angel thing or made like an Angel because it let him groove behind the swastika in public. Number three was a cat who called himself Super Spade and wasn’t kidding—he wore earrings, natural hair, a Stokeley Carmichael sweatshirt, and on a thong around his neck a shrunken head that had been whitened with liquid shoe polish. He was the utility infielder: sitar, base, organ, flute, whatever. Number four, who called himself Mr. Jones, was about the creepiest cat I had ever seen in a rock group, and that is saying something. He was their visuals, synthesizer, and electronics man. He was at least forty, wore early-hippie clothes that looked like they had been made by Sy Devore, and was rumored to be some kind of Rand Corporation dropout. There’s no business like show business.

  “Okay, boys,” I said, “you’re strange, but you’re my kind of strange. Where you worked before?”

  “We ain’t baby,” Clarke said. “We’re the New Thing. I’ve been dealing crystal and acid in the Haight. Hair was drummer for some plastic group in New York. The Super Spade claims it’s the reincarnation of Bird and it don’t pay to argue. Mr. Jones, he don’t talk too much. Maybe he’s a Martian. We just started putting our thing together.” One thing about this business, the groups that don’t have square managers, you can get cheap. They talk too much.

  “Groovy,” I said. “I’m happy to give you guys your start. Nobody knows you, but I think you got something going. So I’ll take a chance and give you a week’s booking. One A.M. to closing, which is two, Tuesday through Sunday, four hundred a week.”

  “Are you Jewish?” asked Hair.

  “What?”

  “Cool it,” Clarke ordered. Hair cooled it. “What it means,” Clarke told me, “is that four hundred sounds like pretty light bread.”

  “We don’t sign if there’s an option clause,” Mr. Jones said.

  “The Jones-thing has a good point,” Clarke said. “We do the first week for four hundred, but after that it’s a whole new scene, dig?”

  I didn’t feature that. If they hit it big, I could end up not being able to afford them. But, on the other hand, four hundred dollars was light bread, and I needed a cheap closing act pretty bad.

  “Okay,” I said. “But a verbal agreement that I get first crack at you when you finish the gig.”

  “Word of honor,” said Stony Clarke.

  That’s this business—the word of honor of an ex-dealer and speed-freak.

  T minus 199 days … and counting… .

  Being unconcerned with ends, the military mind can be easily manipulated, easily controlled, and easily confused. Ends are defined as those goals set by civilian authority. Ends are the conceded province of civilians; means are the province of the military, whose duty it is to achieve the ends set for it by the most advantageous application of the means at its command.

  Thus the confusion over the war in Asia among my uniformed clients at the Pentagon. The end has been duly set: eradication of the guerrillas. But the civilians have overstepped their bounds and meddled in means. The generals regard this as unfair, a breach of contract, as it were. The generals (or the faction among them most inclined to paranoia) are beginning to see the conduct of the war, the political limitation on means, as a ploy of the civilians for performing a putsch against their time-honored prerogatives.

  This aspect of the situation would bode ill for the country, were it not for the fact that the growing paranoia among the generals has enabled me to manipulate them into presenting both my scenarios to the President. The President has authorized implementation of the major scenario, provided that the minor scenario is successful in properly molding public opinion.

  My major scenario is simple and direct. Knowing that the poor flying weather makes our conventional
air power, with its dependency on relative accuracy, ineffectual, the enemy has fallen into the pattern of grouping his forces into larger units and launching punishing annual offensives during the monsoon season. However, these larger units are highly vulnerable to tactical nuclear weapons, which do not depend upon accuracy for effect. Secure in the knowledge that domestic political considerations preclude the use of nuclear weapons, the enemy will once again form into division-sized units or larger during the next monsoon season. A parsimonious use of tactical nuclear weapons, even as few as twenty one-hundred-kiloton bombs, employed simultaneously and in an advantageous pattern, will destroy a minimum of two hundred thousand enemy troops, or nearly two-thirds of his total force, in a twenty-four-hour period. The blow will be crushing.

  The minor scenario, upon whose success the implementation of the major scenario depends, is far more sophisticated, due to its subtler goal: public acceptance of, or, optimally, even public clamor for, the use of tactical nuclear weapons. The task is difficult, but my scenario is quite sound, if somewhat exotic, and with the full, if to some extent clandestine, support of the upper military hierarchy, certain civil government circles and the decision-makers in key aerospace corporations, the means now at my command would seem adequate. The risks, while statistically significant, do not exceed an acceptable level.

  T minus 189 days … and counting… .

  The way I see it, the network deserved the shafting I gave them. They shafted me, didn’t they? Four successful series I produce for those bastards, and two bomb out after thirteen weeks and they send me to the salt mines! A discotheque, can you imagine they make me producer at a lousy discotheque! A remittance man they make me, those schlockmeisters. Oh, those schnorrers made the American Dream sound like a kosher deal—twenty percent of the net, they say. And you got access to all our sets and contract players; it’ll make you a rich man, Herm. And like a yuk, I sign, being broke at the time, without reading the fine print. I should know they’ve set up the American Dream as a tax loss? I should know that I’ve gotta use their lousy sets and stiff contract players and have it written off against my gross? I should know their shtick is to run the American Dream at a loss and then do a network TV show out of the joint from which I don’t see a penny? So I end up running the place for them at a paper loss, living on salary, while the network rakes it in off the TV show that I end up paying for out of my end.