I first discovered David Weber’s novels as a chubby, socially ostracized thirteen-year-old. One of my few friends brought in a dog-eared copy of a book called In Death Ground, sporting an epigraph that I couldn’t ignore:
In difficult ground, press on;
In encircled ground, devise stratagems;
In death ground, fight.
Sun Tzu in The Art of War (circa 400 B.C.)
Although I had never read The Art of War, its veneration among generals and business executives had imbued it with a mythological significance approaching scripture. The halo cast by The Art of War illuminated In Death Ground, casting a long shadow over To Kill a Mockingbird: sitting unread in my locker, despite being assigned as homework.
It took me three days to read all 640 pages of In Death Ground, and then another four to read it again. I woke up at 4 a.m. to read it before school, I hid in the library to devour it during recess, and I even smuggled it into Quaker Meeting on Sunday to read while I was supposed to be silently reflecting on the light of God that dwells in the heart of every person. The irony of reading a book in which millions of humans and their nemeses, the “bugs,” slaughter each other, while I sat among devout pacifists was entirely lost on an adolescent brain that had just discovered the literary equivalent of cocaine.
In Death Ground is a “space opera,” a term coined by author Wilson Tucker in 1941 for a particular sub-class of science fiction. Tucker was not a fan of space operas, calling them “hacky, grinding, stinking, outworn spaceship yarn[s].” Although I think Tucker was being uncharitable, space operas do tend to be light on subtlety and heavy on melodrama, space warfare, and chivalric adventure. Despite occasional mockery as “not real literature,” space opera books and movies have been popular for decades, from Frank Herbert’s Dune, to Isaac Asimov’s Foundation Series, to Star Wars.
Among space operas, David Weber’s novel most resembles Starship Troopers, even borrowing the antagonist bugs from Robert Heinlein’s seminal work. For a more contemporary comparison, In Death Ground pairs the extreme violence of Tom Clancy’s novels with the moral simplicity of, well, Tom Clancy’s novels. In the universe of In Death Ground, humanity has discovered a means of interstellar travel via “warp points” that permit instantaneous transit over great distances. After traveling through an uncharted warp point, a survey squadron discovers a hive species of technologically advanced bugs that ambushes the squadron and proceeds to invade human space. Faced with extermination from the bugs whose only apparent motive for genocide is genocide itself, humans create a Grand Alliance with the cat-like Orions, the bird-like Ophiuchi, and the Centaur-like Gorm to, ahem, exterminate the bugs.
To tell this story, Weber and his collaborator Steve White focus primarily on three factors:
- Good-natured, even-keeled military protagonists, cracking jokes that inspire their crews in the face of certain death
- Lovingly rendered, novella-length depictions of interstellar battles
- Near-pornographic descriptions of futuristic weapon development
Reading In Death Ground was such a formative experience for me that it sparked a multi-year saturation in Weber’s many many books. In addition to In Death Ground’s prequel and several sequels, I discovered Weber’s Empire of Man Series, where a bunch of marines have to fight their way across a hostile alien planet; the Safehold Series, where an entire planet is in thrall to a despotic anti-technology theocracy; and his Dahak Series, where the Moon turns out to be a spaceship, and also aliens are coming to vaporize the Earth.
Although the beats of Weber’s plots are virtually indistinguishable from one another, I found immense meaning in them as an adolescent. I wasn’t athletic or cool or especially smart, and often felt disengaged from my own world. These melodramatic, simplistic stories allowed me to check out of my solitary, tedious life, and inhabit a violent, but predictable world in which people always found a way to come together and support each other to defeat the enemy. In a school environment where I craved emotional support, the unwavering (perhaps unrealistic) loyalty and reliability that Weber’s characters typified filled an unhealthy gap in my psyche. Weber’s exaggerated stories with patently absurd stakes were vitally important to a boy who needed a vibrant sanctuary: a fantastical world where heroes looked out for one another and bullies, along with genocidal bugs, always lost in the end.
It’s tempting to perform a rhetorical sleight-of-hand and restrict my focus to those features of In Death Ground that don’t involve wanton slaughter. But it would be dishonest to ignore Weber’s expert depictions of warfare, which were fundamental to my love for his books. Weber is an amateur military historian, and he adapts tactics from historical wars to write exquisite battle scenes that play out in cinematic detail. I found (and often still find) his breathless descriptions of combat absolutely thrilling. My juvenile mind was obsessed with his meticulous portrayals of weapon development, and I always cherished the precise moment when the heroes unleashed a heretofore unrevealed missile system, stunning the enemy and saving the planet (or species or galaxy).
The sort of unchecked, always justifiable violence that Weber flaunts throughout his series is and was anathema to my pacifistic moral upbringing (remember, Quaker). Still, its use in fiction felt markedly different than the wars I was watching play out in the news. I felt compelled to protest the preemptive war in Iraq, and then equally motivated to head home to revel in fictional stories about violent wars against unfamiliar aggressors. Appreciation for this philosophical dichotomy is not universal. My parents, for instance, have little patience for gratuitous fictional violence, linking it inextricably with violence in the real world. That line of reasoning never quite swayed me. Although I could never have articulated it at the time, I didn’t correlate Weber’s elegantly choreographed combat with genuine violence because its fantastical setting and ridiculous scale made it all feel metaphorical. The action was just another manifestation of the protagonists’ internal struggles. It took another decade and a half for me to learn about the Hero’s Journey, but Weber’s books introduced me to the integration of inner and outer conflict long before I had the vocabulary to identify it. This type of detached, allegorical combat stood in stark contrast to, say Crime and Punishment, which nearly traumatized me a few years later with its deep, realistic immersion in the psychology of a murderer.
I am now 31, and a very different Dustin from the boy who began his Space Opera journey with Weber 18 years ago. Nevertheless, I still occasionally pick up his books to dive once more into his predictable, blood-soaked universe. I can enjoy short, weekend-long vacations into Weber’s stories, while maintaining a healthy skeptical distance from some of his more irritating habits. For instance, I have less patience than I used to for one-dimensional characters that all speak in the same, dry, sardonic voice. I have outgrown the fascination with enlightened despotism that permeates his novels.
But for all his flaws, Weber still manages to draw me in, even as an adult. His deftly constructed combat scenes impress me as much today as they did when I was a teenager. With a broader understanding of the tropes and biases in military novels, I can better appreciate an author who was, in the 1990s and early 2000s, writing military science fiction with gay characters whose sexuality was unremarkable, rather than a defining feature. And eighteen years after my first read, I still get goosebumps when a promising young commander orders her ship to fly into certain death in order to give the rest of her squadron time to escape. After all, I’m only human.