Slice of PIE: Real Wars and Science Fiction Solutions

NOT using the panel discussions of the most recent World Science Fiction Convention in Kansas City in August 2016 (to which I was invited and had a friend pay my membership! [Thanks, Paul!] but was unable to go (until I retire from education)), I will jump off, jump on, rail against, and shamelessly agree with the BRIEF DESCRIPTION given in the pdf copy of the Program Guide. But not today.

In the March 1973 issue of ANALOG Science Fiction & Fact, there was a novelette by John Brunner, prolific author of several genres and pen names, that has stayed with me for nearly a half century.

I was fifteen years old and I’d been reading ANALOG for three years. Saigon fell to Communist forces two years later and a bitter, angry, embarrassed, and defeated US military and ambassadorial corp limped home to lick its wounds and shut itself off from the world of overseas wars for the next quarter century.

In Brunner’s story, “Who Steals My Purse”, the US was fighting a losing battle in Vietnam. But in THIS 1973, a newly elected president and his people have a plan for ending the war in Vietnam by overwhelming the peasants with stuff. Tools, food, education, more tools, seeds, a bit of propaganda, needles, a “microfilm library, one per village, complete with magnifier”…some two thousand items in color-coded boxes and video instructions in Vietnamese.

These were dropped on Vietnam using a repurposed ICBM and the story implies that the war was won.

In our history, Oil Price Shock and the Yom Kippur War destabilized the South Vietnam government and it was unable to maintain its hold on the country. In April of 1975 (my senior year in high school), Saigon fell to the communist Viet Cong, and China and the Soviet Union bolstered their satellite nation -- which today is still one of four countries who claim their politics to be communist…but its economy has grown dramatically and it is slowly becoming a wealthy country.

All of that took forty plus years. Brunner had proposed to short circuit the war by flooding the country with a wealth of material possessions because who WOULDN'T want our stuff?

Interesting, but I'm going to insert a bit here about Eastern versus Western worldviews. This Youtube was helpful, if simplistic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=URtrGFxLbg4

In essence: religions are radically different; focus is different to a point where Westerners see themselves as a big, fat INDIVIDUAL in a crowd, and Easterners see the CROWD as holding their identity; Westerners see time and events as “ready, set, GO…*bang!*, THE END”; Easterners see time and events as circular, never ending, and flowing one to the other and back again. Worldviews that are inherently irreconcilable.

While “Who Steals My Purse” left a deep mark on that fifteen-year-old, Brunner’s solution was too radical for its time. Americans were still stuck on manifest destiny.

Don’t get me wrong, that’s where I was at, too. But as a teen growing up in the wake of the Sixties, worldviews and politics were changing rapidly. The country seemed to be desperate to regain its sense of world juggernaut. I remember the truly MASSIVE Bi-Centennial Celebrations of 1976 and was as caught up with them as everyone else. But manifest destiny had fallen by the wayside, never to reappear. But we viewed the solution of the world's problems as a "if we just work hard enough, it'll be OK".

Which brings me to today and a story I wrote called, “What The Cockroach Said”…and a little conflict the US got so involved with sixty-some years ago, that we’re STILL involved with today. It's an undeclared war in which only a very, very few shots have been fired in sixty years.

Of course, I'm talking about the Korean War. In my story, we use a peculiar technology involving “cockroach robots” (see this Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=81Zv8PPF8bE), some microminiaturized communication devices, and a knowledge of North Korean worldview. It’s been rejected several times already – no idea why – CC Finlay (F&SF) said that there were elements that he liked; Neil Clarke (Clarkesworld) said, generically that it wasn’t quite what he was looking for; Ben Kinney (Escape Pod) said that they, “greatly enjoyed this story's concept, but it felt a bit repetitive for our tastes; and particularly in the beginning, the prose didn't quite work for us.”; I revised and sent it again. Jonathan and Michelle (DSF) generically decided not to publish it; it’s now in the hands of Sheila Williams at ASIMOV’S.

In it, the cockroaches appear to Korean people and invoke juche. Juche is an ancient Korean concept that, according to Wikipedia is: “usually left untranslated, or translated as "self-reliance"…the official state ideology of North Korea [which] says that an individual is "the master of his destiny", that the North Korean masses are to act as the "masters of the revolution and construction", and that by becoming a self-reliant and strong nation one can achieve true socialism.” It has also been “criticized by many scholars and observers as a mechanism for sustaining the dictatorial rule of the North Korean regime, and justifying the country's heavy-handed isolationism and oppression of the North Korean people. It has also been described as a form of Korean ethnic nationalism, but one which promotes the Kim family as the saviours of the "Korean Race" and acts as a foundation of the subsequent personality cult surrounding them.”

I won’t give away my solution, but you can probably draw conclusions based on the hints I gave above.

Oh, last of all, wondering why I care about the whole North-South Korea thing? Maybe yes, maybe no? I'll tell you why anyway: my son, daughter-in-law, and grandkids are stationed there and lest you think they’re “just one of the mass of soldier-types”, they live off-base, have Korean friends, and both my grandkids go to Korean schools…just so.

Image: https://d1466nnw0ex81e.cloudfront.net/n_iv/600/1482389.jpg