Warfare at Troynovant:
Battling among the history & concepts of
War, General Weaponry, & Philosophy of War;
listed by Title

Note that many fine war novels & poems, films, or stories which include battles or a wartime setting and the like are not listed here unless the work or the review struggles with general ideas about warfare as a literary genre, the warrior's code in men and women, the nature of war or intercultural conflict, and so on.
  

Next month, Anson MacDonald [a pseudonym for Robert A. Heinlein] presents a story about an irresistible weapon — "Solution Unsatisfactory," and the title is the Editor's. MacDonald, rather dissatisfied himself, called it "Foreign Policy." The point is that the author's solution to the problem raised in the story — that of a nation, our nation, in possession of an irresistible, but easily imitated weapon — is not tenable. Furthermore, it isn't a pleasant solution anyway. But the trouble is, there doesn't seem to be any solution save the one MacDonald advances — and that one is one no American could accept with equanimity. It's dictatorship, in fact, in the harshest, most stringent form possible, with a super-police force empowered to deal life and death to whole cities at their discretion.

The story's a challenge as it stands. There is no irresistible weapon now, of course, and all the history of war has shown that cries of "It's irresistible!" have been false. But, as MacDonald points out in his story, the little boy cried "Wolf! Wolf!" until when the wolf came nobody believed it. But the wolf did come.

And MacDonald suggests that the weapon will come — and come in about three years. Personally, I'm most desperately afraid he's absolutely correct.

Read the yarn, and let's have your suggestions as to how to get a satisfactory solution ...

The Editor

John W. Campbell, Jr.
Astounding Science Fiction, April 1941


  
Advertisement Touching a Holy War Francis Bacon RW Franson
Anzio (film) Dmytryk / Mitchum RW Franson

Between Planets Robert A. Heinlein RW Franson

Civil War Day by Day, The E. B. Long RW Franson

Driving Past the Pentagon
  Washington, D.C. 9-11-2001
Jack Kelly

Five Days in London, May 1940 John Lukacs RW Franson
Fortress Hoover and the Vigilantes
  Who Will Wake the Watched?
RW Franson
Frontiers and Wars Winston S. Churchill RW Franson

General, The Buster Keaton RW Franson

German High Command at War, The
  Hindenburg and Ludendorff
  Conduct World War I

Robert B. Asprey RW Franson
Great Contemporaries Winston S. Churchill RW Franson
Greek and Macedonian Art of War, The F.E. Adcock RW Franson
Gunpowder - Alchemy, Bombards and Pyrotechnics
  The History of the Explosive
  that Changed the World
Jack Kelly S Farrell

Horatius at Khazad-dum WH Stoddard

If Lee Had Not Won the Battle of Gettysburg Winston S. Churchill RW Franson

Junkyard Planet
  (The Cosmic Computer)
H. Beam Piper RW Franson

Land Ironclads, The H. G. Wells RW Franson
Lord Kalvan of Otherwhen H. Beam Piper RW Franson

Malakand Field Force, The
  An Episode of Frontier War
Winston S. Churchill RW Franson
Martial Arts of Renaissance Europe, The Sydney Anglo WH Stoddard

Off Armageddon Reef David Weber WH Stoddard
On the Slopes of Vesuvius Robert A. Heinlein RW Franson

Postcard from Occupied Germany
  Wiesbaden-Biebrich, September 1945
DL Franson

Reporting Vietnam
  American Journalism 1959-1975
&mdash— RW Franson
Return of the King, The (film) Tolkien / Jackson WH Stoddard

Shattered Sword
  The Untold Story of the Battle of Midway
Jonathan B. Parshall
  & Anthony P. Tully
RW Franson
Siege of Vienna, The John Stoye RW Franson
1632 Eric Flint RW Franson

Temeraire series Naomi Novik WH Stoddard
1066: Changing the English Channel S Farrell
Tolkien and the Great War
  The Threshold of Middle Earth
John Garth WH Stoddard

Vanishing Private, The (Donald Duck) Disney / King RW Franson

War Before Civilization Lawrence H. Keeley RW Franson
  

  
[Warkworth Castle, Northumberland.]

Lady Percy (to Henry Percy, Hotspur):

In thy faint slumbers I by thee have watched,
And heard thee murmur tales of iron wars,
Speak terms of manege to thy bounding steed,
Cry 'Courage! To the field!' And thou hast talked
Of sallies and retires, of trenches, tents,
Of palisadoes, frontiers, parapets,
Of basilisks, of cannon, culverin,
Of prisoners ransomed, and of soldiers slain,
And all the currents of a heady fight.

William Shakespeare
1 Henry IV, 2.4.41-49

  


  
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weapons, martial arts; gun rights, freedom of self-defense

 

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