SNAFU: Survival of the Fittest

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Situation Normal, All Fucked Up.

That, I think, says it all when it comes to military horror. Soldiers fighting for their lives, and at times for the lives of innocents, against supernatural or unearthly creatures.

Military writing has been around for as long as the written word, and likely for longer, although we only have a few surviving examples of such.

The idea of military speculative fiction (specfic) may seem like a subject not worth spending a whole lot of time talking about.  After all, doesn’t it seem rather self-explanatory? It’s about the military, any branch, and it’s about horror, fantasy, or science fiction. However I believe military specfic is deeper than that.  While it may very well be escapist literature to characterise all of the romanticized visions we have of the military, it can also be a hard-hitting commentary on current events and politics.

Beowulf and Homer’s Odyssey are both examples of early recorded military speculative fiction, although I’m not sure they were designed to be this. The cultures of the time believed in the gods, and sometimes the monsters, of Odyssey.

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