Monday, March 9, 2015

The Literary Genre Of Special Forces Military Fiction Novels

By Leslie Ball


When you love to read, you are always looking for new directions to take yourself, to explore new genres. One such genre that you might wish to consider is the war novel, or special forces military fiction novels. Sometimes, when the author has the opportunity to hide behind a cloak of anonymity, he can spin a more truthful yarn than he could if he were writing a non-fiction feature article.

Most of today's war novels are set outside the United States. Most 21st century conflicts are in practically every other continent apart from North America. The wars in which they are set tend to be in the Gulf or the Balkan states. Prior to that, Vietnam war stories were popular and before that, World War II or Korea. As tensions heat up between NATO and Russia, the next generation of war stories may well focus on an emerging Cold War II.

A hot topic today is the special operations forces, like the Navy SEALs. These units have fewer people, so the cast of characters is easier to maintain. Modern wars no longer take place on huge battlefields so they need a new approach from that of our ancestors. Enter the special ops teams.

The act of authoring a war novel can help a soldier-turned-writer come to terms with what he had to face "over there." It can serve as a catharsis. This could be why so many authors churn out series' of novels. Take Josef Black, for example, and his series called, "The Blades." His novels have been set in Colombia, London, Paris, and Las Vegas.

Also, there are the "AFTER" novels, a post-apocalyptic series about managing life after a giant solar storm kills millions and millions of people. The world's technological structure, i. E., the Internet, is also destroyed. Survivors learn to cope with life without Twitter and a new breed of survivor, the "Zapheads."

Military science fiction is another sub-genre within the war novel classification. These stories tend to be based on past conflicts but retold on a grander scale, involving planets and galaxies instead of countries. A perfect example of this theme was seen in an episode of "Star Trek: The Next Generation, " set in the 24th century, but retelling the story of Gilgamesh, a king of Mesopotamia late in the third millennium, B. C.

Readers have been captivated by war stories since the days of Virgil and Homer and the Aenid and the Iliad, respectively. Although the stories and the characters themselves may not be true to life, it is possible to cram a lot of realistic detail in the descriptions of the scenery, characters and how they lived.

So what's coming next in the world of the war story? There could be a big new paradigm on the horizon as the Navy considers whether to permit women to serve in special warfare combat teams or even the SEALs. The field is wide open for new heroins, new story lines and a new dimension of human wartime relationships.




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