“Armor” and the Holy Trinity of Mil-SF

I’m not into military science fiction.  Hammer’s Slammers?  I’ve heard of it.  Honor Harrington?  Never read it.  Some guy named Marko Kloos got into some sort of spat.  A distaste for open-ended series accounts for more than a bit of my aversion, though, so if I’m going to dip my toe into the subgenre, it’s through standalone books.  The three milSF books that everyone should read, so I’m told, are Starship Troopers by Robert Heinlein, The Forever War by Joe Haldeman, and Armor by John Steakley.

I first read Starship Troopers and The Forever War years ago, and Armor only recently.  Troopers and Forever War are both strong SF novels in their own right, and present an appealing duality.  Starship Troopers follows the career of a volunteer who finds his service in a high-tech war fulfilling and presents an idealized vision of the citizen as soldier.  Vietnam veteran Haldeman wrote about a man conscripted into a war no one really understands, a war which eventually regresses to premodern forms; his service alienates him from society and, eventually, even the soldiers under his command.

Armor is a much different beast.  Both Heinlein and Haldeman had some experience in the military; Steakley was among other things a screenwriter and it shows.  Much discussion I’ve seen about Armor centers around its “human perspective” and the main character’s “internal struggle”.  These elements certainly do exist in the story, although I think that Troopers and Forever War dealt with them in better (though in very different!) ways.  Armor is really the Hollywood action blockbuster to the other two more thoughtful works.

That about sums it up

The number and length of combat action scenes sets it apart from the other two more than anything else.  The action isn’t “fetishistic”, but there sure is a lot of it, and Steakley uses a certain narrative device to trim out the parts where the hero, Felix, isn’t fighting (he fills the resulting space in with something else, on which more in a bit).  Both Rico (Troopers) and Mandella (Forever) are basically ordinary men.  Felix is an Achilles-like superhuman combatant.  He is fleeing a mysterious past under an assumed identity to avoid being recognized as a bigshot.  Steakley does a good job with this but it’s all very Hollywood.

About half of Armor isn’t about Felix and the War Against The Bugs at all but about a famous space rogue named Jack Crow on a frontier planet.  While Steakley does create some suspense around which one of these alternate-narrative characters is Felix, I didn’t much like the conceit.  Presumably it would have helped set up a sequel, but the author died before writing Armor II.  As it is, Armor leaves several serious loose ends hanging.

Armor never even attempts to explain or detail the technology involved space travel or the war.  Both Troopers and Forever War, while not deep into the hard spectrum of the genre, do have interesting things to say about these matters.  Starship Troopers, of course, invented powered armor and orbital drop troopers (the latter clearly through analogy to paratroopers).  Forever War centers around time dilation, of course, but Haldeman also thought considerably about the realities of space combat.

Is Armor worth reading?  Yes, if you’re into the genre.  However, it’s a distant third to Starship Troopers and The Forever War.