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I'm not an expert or anything, but it seems to me that a cursory glance of history reveals one central fact: that the primary motivator behind building great civilizations is to centrally accumulate as many bodies together so as to form a fighting cadre of such power that the only rational step is to go out and vaporize or enslave all your neighbors.

War is in our systems. We love the carnage. Or at least, we find the pain and misery it inflicts okay as long as we have a "reason to fight." Whether we're making the world safe for democracy, stopping dictators from taking over the world, or halting the bone-chilling machinations of genocide, humans are there, in the mix, hurling ordnance at each other.

This was true back in the good old days when high-tech warfare meant someone with a sling and pouch full of perfectly smooth stones, and it will be true even as we colonize the rest of this solar system and beyond.

I have to admit, after my run-in with war -- albeit short, thankfully -- in Panama in December of 1989 (I was a civilian there, had been born in the country, had lived through all the horseshit that a pseudo-fascist junta can throw at a people, et cetera), that war is not very thrilling. You sit around wondering if artillery will flatten your neighborhood, or if that GI with the M-60 is bored enough to rock and roll up and down your street, or whether this or that group of hoodlums out looting stores will turn up at your house. You learn to not sleep a lot. You go from quiet and reserved to pumped and ready. You're scared most of the time.

So although I have some pretty mixed emotions about war, I enjoy a good war story. The good ones not only tell of ultimate sacrifice and courage, but illuminate other aspects of everyday life: what soldiers eat, when and where they bathe or find entertainment, where they hailed from and what they did back home. These are the details that keep us reading, even when we feel we can't take any more vividly captured scenes in which faces get shot off or legs get blown away.

The stories in the Future War anthology seek, in their own ways, to get a grip on the shifting modality of what war may be like in the future. Two of the stories are set in a Cold War or Post-Cold War environment ("Second Variety" by Philip K. Dick and "Rovik's War" by Geoffrey A. Landis), and although they seem a little dated (Dick's story was first published in 1953!) the feverish intensity of human emotion blazes throughout the narratives in question. These are not just fine specimens of speculative fiction -- no, they capture the essence of nauseating fear and hope and hate and anger and detachment that is life at the edge of imminent death.

Or as Lucius Shepard, in his masterful "Salvador" puts it:

He would have liked very much to drive home and forget about his promise to Phil; however, he felt a responsibility to explain about the war. More than a responsibility, an evangelistic urge. He would tell them about the kid falling out of the chopper, the white-haired girl in Tecolutla, the emptiness. God, yes! How you went down chock-full of ordinary American thoughts and dreams, memories of smoking weed and chasing tail and hanging out and freeway flying with a case of something cold, and how you smuggled back a human-shaped container of pure Salvadorian emptiness.

Thomas Myer is a technical writer for Cisco Systems, Inc. Besides writing, he fills his time with jeet kune do, eating vegan goodies, and generally being sassy.