War Is Hell: Difference between revisions

* [[Dale Brown]] tears strips out of [[Elites Are More Glamorous]] in his works. You may be a member of a top secret unit with the [[Bigger Stick]], but the numbers will always be on the enemy's side. Plan for every contingency, do your best, and at best the enemy will still get licks in. At worst, friends and trusted comrades will die. Succeed and no one will know your name; fail and at best you die, at worst you are disavowed, thrown to the wolves of public opinion as a sacrifice by uncaring superiors. War is never pretty even from behind a drone control station.

* The ''[[Horatio Hornblower]]'' books do not make any attempts to conceal the awfulness of British Navy life in the Napoleonic Wars. What with the gory descriptions of battle, hideous injury, worse medical care, brutal discipline, and foul food and water (this last is not [[Arson, Murder, and Jaywalking|inconsequential]]), the eponymous lead at one point thinks that the prison volunteers on his crew would have done better to stay in jail.

* The [[Vorkosigan Saga]] plays with this trope a lot. For a Military SF series, there's not a whole lot of actual warfare going on; instead there's tons of low-level skulduggery and spy versus spy shenanigans to ''prevent'' full-scale wars from breaking out. The very few times some real mayhem occurs, we always get to see the [[Tear Jerker|consequences]].

* This is one of the main themes in [[Andrey Livadny]]'s ''[[The History of the Galaxy]]'' books, especially the books that take place during the First Galactic War, a 30-year bloodbath started when the dictator-ruled [[The Empire|Earth Alliance]] destroys the Dabog colony as a lesson to the other Free Colonies, sparking [[The War Of Earthy Aggression]] that eventually resulted in the total defeat of Earth and the establishment of the [[The Federation|Confederacy of Suns]]. Since the novels are focused on characters, we get to experience the full extent of the horrors of war, especially, as the author calls it, the "technogenic" war, in which rapid technological progress has resulted in more ways to wipe out your fellow man than one can count. The full extent can be seen in novels featuring [[Humongous Mecha]] fights (of the [[Real Robot Genre|Real Robot]] kind). The novel ''Serv-batallion'' as it shows a group of teens from Earth being conscripted to fight a war they don't support and, essentially, sacrified by their commanding officer in order to get a Colonial [[Wave Motion Gun]]. Other novels involve war vets trying to adjust to living in a post-war galaxy.