Life During Wartime

Author: Lucius Shepard

The Vietnam War had a profound effect on a generation of American science fiction writers (you'll find many traces of it in the work of Joe Haldeman, for example), but it was Lucius Shepard who managed to turn the experience of the war into an astonishing work of science fiction. His stories and novels are frequently set in lush, steamy jungles where humans are diminished to their most basic impulses amid the overwhelming noise and smell and colour of the place. This is best seen in his fix-up novel, Life During Wartime. Here the Vietnam War is transposed to a future war in Central America. David Mingolla is a typical American grunt caught up in a very science fictional army, where helicopter pilots have heads-up displays that detach them from any humanity, where most soldiers use a wide variety of drugs, and where Mingolla is recruited to Psicorps where he will be trained as a psychic. But when he deserts he finds that the other side, manipulated by two ancient families, are fighting a magic realist war where, for instance, a downed pilot is suffocated by a host of beautiful butterflies. Why it's on the list: Shepard wrote a rich prose that no-one else writing science fiction at the time could match. This novel, like many of his stories, combined technologically acute science fiction with evocative magic realism, opening the genre to more literary sensibilities.