📚 Fear, War, & God: Post-Rationalist Philosophy... in SPAAAAAACE

A Review of the War Dogs Trilogy by Greg Bear

I recently picked up the War Dogs Trilogy by Greg Bear (affiliate link, most of them are, the links are shorter that way) because of a comment

Patrick Tanguay

left on my article about fiction that utilizes trees well — apparently his book Legacy has an interesting ecosystem in it. I will definitely get around to reading Legacy soon, but it ended up being easier to get my hands on War Dogs, which looked very up my alley.

War Dogs felt like classic military scifi updated for the modern world in the best way. It’s got all the “war is driven by complex motivations” elements you expect from something loosely in the tradition of Forever War or Confederation of Valor. It does a nice job of emphasizing how technology shapes the battlefield and influences outcomes, which has been on my mind a lot after stumbling across an offhand comment from Tanner Greer about how ancient humans used to view war as fundamentally a religious ritual in which the gods showed their favor by choosing a winner — rather than being fundamentally about technology or tactics.

The Sunzi’s insistence that military methods were more important to the state’s survival than sacrifice was not merely radical–it was nonsensical. In the early Chinese world view, sacrifice and warfare could not be separated from each other. As with the Aztecs, Maya, and many other premodern peoples, for the Chinese of Zhou times, warfare was a sacrificial ritual.

There were other elements that reminded me of the Confederation of Valor, as well — notably the dynamics of the alien factions and the causes of the war. It’s not a 1:1 similarity — and I don’t want to get too deep into spoilers — but it does a nice job of respinning ideas like “humans didn’t evolve on this planet,” “our enemies are perhaps not as different from us as we think,” and “soldiers fight to protect their friends” into a new configuration. The iffy air supply implicit in fighting a war on Mars lends a lot of very realistic tension to the plot, and while it doesn’t make much attempt to be truly hard science fiction, the timeframes involved felt realistic and the warfighting methods of the ‘Skyrine’ soldiers did too.

Fans of Ringworld, Dungeon Crawler Carl, and Starship Troopers — all of which are, if not flawless, most assuredly worth reading — will probably enjoy this one.

The sociopolitical commentary never edged over into hot-button culture war issues, but there were enough references to people like Elon Musk and the rationalist movement to make it feel fresh and up-to-date. I never felt like I was too young to get the references to things like “The Winter Soldier.” The portrayal of relations between Russian, Japanese, American, and Canadian governments felt like something out of 2020 and not 1960, which was nice.

It’s really difficult to discuss a great book that kept you on the edge of your seat with mysteries to solve in a way that doesn’t ruin it for the very people you’re trying to convince it’s worth a read, so instead of talking any more about the plot, I want to focus on the flavor.

Fear is a drug you need to survive. Without fear, you die quicker;

The litany against fear is probably one of the most famous motifs in Dune, which is one of the most influential science fiction books in the world right now. Between the obvious relevance of the anti-AI Butlerian Jihad (“Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind.”), the manner in which spice is fundamentally a metaphor for oil, and the ways in which we’re in a vast cultural debate about what it means for a group to change their environment ‘for the better’… Dune is having a moment.

So it’s pretty fun to see a meaty, thoughtful, well-written science fiction book holding up the mirror. Dune is a space opera, with a great many fantastical elements and relatively little effort spent on ‘low magic’ gritty realism. War Dogs feels much more grounded.

And I’m contrarian enough that Scott Alexander’s comment that it can be valuable to “reverse the advice you hear” often makes sense.

“Fear is the mind-killer” doesn’t just show up in Dune. You see it in grimdark books like Glen Cook’s She Is The Darkness¹ as well. You see it in videos devoted to offering self-improvement advice. You see it in the philosophical canon of western thought:

Philosophers and psychologists alike have long explored the concept of fear and its effects on human behavior. Søren Kierkegaard, the Danish philosopher, famously discussed the idea of existential dread, a form of deep-seated fear tied to the uncertainty of existence. Similarly, Nietzsche’s concept of übermensch encourages individuals to transcend the limitations imposed by fear and societal expectations.

Mastering our fear is important, especially living in a society that has veered pretty hard into safetyism (at least according to guys like Jon Haidt — you can evaluate the arguments yourself at

After Babel

). But my own kids are sometimes a little too fearless — a few hours before I got on a plane to Florence, my daughter took a head-first swan dive out of her stroller and gave herself a beaut of a concussion, complete with wobbly legs and vomit. For far more extreme examples of this, you have the kids that don’t feel pain and die young because of nasty burns when they touch a hot stove and don’t realize it’s hurting them.

Fear seems pretty useful. So is pain — and not just the physical kind. One again going back to Scott Alexander — who I thought of often while reading War Dogs — he’s made this specific point in the context of dating; his 2019 article Pain As Active Ingredient points out “You can create clever dating sites that remove the pain. Sometimes it will work: lots of people have gotten great dates on Reciprocity. But other times people just won’t ask each other out.” Costly signals have value, etc.

But then there are people like Jo Cameron who functionally feel no pain, no shame, no fear, no anxiety, and manage to be engaged citizens doing sensitive work with difficult patients and giving birth without a problem. Apparently her wounds heal perfectly, without scars.

On a related note, there’s been an uptick in discourse around shame lately, in the context of things like “…maybe our society would be better off if people still felt shame about…”

Heinlein once said, “Everything in excess! To enjoy the flavor of life, take big bites. Moderation is for monks” — but I think when it comes to things like shame and fear and pain, moderation is good, actually. There’s a middle path here, and I liked that War Dogs reminded me of it.

The need for this kind of balance doesn’t go unnoticed elsewhere in War Dogs.

Command can also decide to turn a fountain into a fuel depot, reserving its hydrogen and oxygen for propellant. We’ve all heard of fountains letting warriors suffocate on the Red for the greater strategic good—allowing someone else to get home again. Which do you need more? A return ticket, or enough to breathe? It’s a nasty balance. Needless to say, Skyrines have a love-hate relationship with fountains.

A lot of military fiction shies away from the need to make hard choices. There always seems to be some kind of subtext that says, “only bad leaders decide to sacrifice people instead of saving them.” Oh, you’ll see heroines like Honor Harrington go into battle where her people will die, but it’s very rare to see a statement along the lines of it sometimes being the right thing to do to leave people to die. That’s not how our cultural ethos is set up, we’re a “nobody gets left behind” kind of culture², same as how we’re an “innocent until proven guilty” culture — at least in terms of the shining ideals. Before War Dogs, L. E. Modesitt is one of the few people I’ve seen tackle the idea that it is in some important ways moral cowardice to let a bunch of people die because you are unwilling to take action that ‘feels’ immoral — killing someone you know is going to cause greater harm, before you have ‘proof.’ The actions of the protagonist from The Shadow Sorceress are the opposite of The Minority Report, if you will — and without even the advantage of precognition.

I liked that War Dogs doesn’t pretend that wars can be fought without making hard decisions, in which there are no right answers. It was written before the conflicts in Palestine and Ukraine, but now more than ever I think it’s the sort of thing people need to be reminded of.

Physics is what kills you, but biology is what wants you dead.

War Dogs had a lot of pithy, evocative lines like the above. Classification is hard, but I thought this was an interestingly sideways way to think about schools of science. At another point in the book, the protagonist says he ‘hates physics,’ which isn’t meant to be a slight on learning physics or physics class or anything like ‘the difficulty of dealing with equations’ but rather the hard realities of physics like “gravity exists” and “space is big.”

Years ago, at a friend’s wedding, I asked a group of math professors and engineers to explain to me the difference between Einsteinian and Newtonian physics. It was just casual dinnertime conversation, but I got a better explanation than my physics teacher ever gave me, and it stuck with me: the difference is like a curve vs. the tangent of a curve (in the calculus sense). They both touch on the specific point, but they give you different information. The tangent line gives a linear approximation — good enough for small scales and low speeds. That's Newton. The curve itself represents reality on large scales and high speeds — that's Einstein. At least if I haven’t buggered up the explanation, which is always possible.

Anyway, one of the neat things that War Dogs did was offer up an interesting way of thinking about problems like gravity and space. ‘Traditional’ science fiction usually feels like the Age of Sail in SPAAAAACE³. The language tends toward tugboats, puddle jumpers, etc. Ships often ‘trim sails’ to ride ‘gravity waves’ unless there’s something like a wormhole to go through — and even then, unless there’s atmosphere involved, the ships all sort of fundamentally work the same.

“You don’t use a bicycle to cross the ocean,” Joe says. That’s either profound, or profoundly stupid. “Every ship works on a different scale.”

In War Dogs, the entire paradigm and fundamental nature of traveling from Earth to Mars is different from traveling from Earth to Uranus — and very different from how it works to travel beyond the solar system. Wormholes never come up, and neither do sails.

The worldbuilding hangs together very well, and is accessible without shying away from hard science concepts or relying too much on tropey metaphors.

We bloody enjoy death and destruction. Sex is obscene. War is holy.

War Dogs also had an interesting meditation on culture and theology. Books like Starship Troopers have us pre-disposed to think of ‘bugs in space’ as the bad guys — or at least the enemy, but in War Dogs they were more like scientific curiosities.

It’s a bit of an understatement to say that the protagonist learned a lot from Bug artifacts, but one of the most interesting bits was a reminder that there are many ways for a religion to work.

But that was okay, apparently; the bug thinkers knew that the interior heat and mix of poisons helped explain their origins, how life began here in the first place. Death became a kind of deity to the thinking bugs, as much as they had a god—death and, for an increasing crowd of rarefied intellectuals, whatever caused the tides and friction. Whatever it was that kept them alive. Their god was something they thought they could find. I’m okay with that. I wish it were true for me.

I talked above about the idea of war as ritual, but as the world watches the Vatican enter into the process of choosing a new Pope — and therefore millions of people begin debating anew the history of the Catholic Church — it was a timely reminder that some religions are less about believing and more about doing. I’ve come across similar sentiments in parenting groups, as well — mothers struggling with postpartum depression often feel horrible for not loving their children the way they feel they ought to. The response is often: you are feeding the baby, you are hugging the baby, you are keeping the baby clothed and warm and safe — love is an action.

Reminds me of the whole ‘5 love languages’ thing, but of them — acts of service, gift-giving, quality time, words, and touch — none are “feeling a certain type of way in your heart.”

One of my favorite newsletters is

Graphs about Religion

by

Ryan Burge

. As someone who attends church fairly regularly but struggles with the ‘belief’ part and what to call myself on surveys, I’m always struck by how other people handle those variables — and the number of people who identify as members of a religious group because they ‘believe in God’ but don’t actually partake in any of the religious rituals is always startling to me. I gave up candy for Lent this year, and I’m really coming around to the idea that a relationship with God and religion doesn’t have to be doomed just because I don’t approach it from the same perspective my (young earth creationist) Grandma did.

Heavy stuff to be getting out of a military sci-fi book, but hell — Stranger in a Strange Land literally inspired a religion, so it’s in good company. And I think that Michael Venn had it right when he narrated my favorite line of all from War Dogs:

You only really improve by doing.

1. The Black Company series is also excellent, if you’re into military fiction, although my husband found the visuals a bit lacking and I personally prefer his more urban fantasyish Garrett P.I. series, which begins with Sweet Silver Blues and has one of the best naming schemes in fiction.

2. See also: the examples in this depressing article about the Copenhagen Theory of Ethics.

3. The Confederation of Valor includes an afterward outright applauding the reader if they happened to notice that the first book, Valor’s Choice, is based on the Battle of Rorke’s Drift — it’s the Zulu Wars in SPAAAAACE. Incidentally, this is one of the few series my husband and I both read and loved.