Nothing beats a military SF battle!  The hiss of  plasma beams bouncing off body armour.  Computer targeted bullets that hunt their enemy.  And robots that can fight wars.   For many decades, science fiction writers within the space opera and military SF genres have revelled in such wild fantastical extrapolations.

However, when I was writing my first SF novel DEBATABLE SPACE,  I was very struck by the fact that in modern wars then being fought (this was at the height of the Iraq war) such supposed science fictional technology had become  a matter of fact.  We’ve seen smart missiles turning corners and unmanned drones hovering above enemy forces, and peasant guerrillas brandishing surface to air rocket-launchers that fire missiles with computer tracking technology.  The war of the future is with us today;  and my Doppelganger Robots are no more than a minor extrapolation of what is taking place already.

And more recently, I’ve been researching this area from the opposite direction, while writing a three part radio drama for the BBC about contemporary military wargames.  I went to the Defence Academy in the South of England, where soldiers are trained in simulated warfare using computer joysticks and even computers with steering wheels (like Wii games…!)  I tried my hand at the flight simulator, and crashed the darn aeroplane with worrying swiftness (hey, I’m a writer, not a warrior!) And I learned about the army bases with simulation tanks where you can experience flying an Apache helicopter in the midst of combat, with no risk of being killed.

One of the earliest wargames is the Prussian board game Kriegspiel,  played on a specially built table with dice to control the outcomes. Now complex computer simulations are used,  but with real soldiers dealing with the situations thrown up on their computer screens. Wargames can be massive affairs, involving thousands of soldiers in Britain, Europe and America dealing with the same imaginary conflict.  Often aircraft hangars are used to house the wargamers, who may play a variety of different roles,  in different accents.  While the soldiers at the ‘sharp end’  will sit in tents in muddy fields watching the war unfold on their computer screens; as virtual missiles fly through the air towards them, and virtual soldiers die.  It’s like World of Warcraft, except these people are rehearsing for the real thing.

And sometimes, wargames turn into out and out LARPs –  involving battallions and tanks and guns with live ammunition.  The most notorious such ‘field exercise’ wargame was Operation Able Archer in  the 1980s.  This was the Cuban Missile Crisis, Round 2, and it came about when the West, including the US and British governments, staged a full scale Third World War wargame in Germany, using real troops.  The Russians were casually told this was just an exercise; but, being paranoid, they suspected a devious ruse.  And when Margaret Thatcher and German Chancellor Helmut Kohl both participated in the nuclear drill, the Russians decided war was imminent, and plans for a pre-emptive nuclear strike were set in motion.

Remember 1983? Kenny Rogers and Dolly Parton sang Islands in the Stream on the radio; and meanwhile, the world nearly ended.

Luckily for all of us, the wargame ended before the Russian’s itchy trigger fingers twitched; but it’s a chilling example of the fine line between fiction and reality.

Wargames are, in essence, a form of science fiction; they are extrapolations based on fact but with invented premises and fictional scenarios.  Wars are fought between Red and Blue, not between named nations.  And, most fascinatingly from my point of view, wargames generally will have an author. This will be a senior soldier acting in a consultancy capacity who will be the Exercise Writer. His or her job is to invent countries, give them names and geographies, and set them at war.  There is one actual wargame featuring the fictional nation of Atlantis, in a country with its own geography.  All this is in many ways eerily similar to the process of writing a science fiction or  fantasy novel.  It’s about world building;  armies are created and given weapons; fictional biographies are written for the key participants in intricate detail. And then, once the wargame is written, the soldiers who are being trained play their roles – as if for real.

And sometimes,  the computer simulation and the ‘real life’ field exercise will merge; so the computer screen at HQ will show images of an attacking army of tanks and armoured personnel carriers as filmed from an aerial drone; some of which are real, and some of which are imaginary.  Real tanks trundle beside virtual tanks; it’s exactly the same as CGI in the movies, when a few real ships at sea become an attacking armada of thousands of vessels.

But these games are not always just games; sometimes people die. Because whenever you have real trucks and real tanks, accidents will happen.  And if live rounds are used, there’s always a chance someone will get hit with one.   The most catastrophic wargame in recent military history came in 1943, in Operation Tiger – a full scale rehearsal for the D-Day invasion, which took place in Devon in conditions of deepest secrecy. An entire town was evacuated, and at the insistence of the Americans, real shells were fired on to the Devon beaches, to toughen the men up for combat conditions.  However, due to a monumental SNAFU (military slang for Situation Normal, All F***** Up), more than 300 British soldiers were killed.  The deaths were hushed up; the invasion of Normandy went ahead. And the rest, as we know, is history.

As my main character Bradley Shoreham says, we live in the age of the wargame.  Oil companies wargame what will happen if there’s a major oil spill; companies will wargame what will happen if they lose their market share.  And every time our troops go to war, someone somewhere will have wargamed it.  Every government will have a wargame calendar, based on scenarios ranging from terrorist attack to a nuclear power plant explosion.  And so,  as we go about our everyday lives,  there are people out there planning  extrapolative disasters of the most stomach-churning horror…

Red and Blue, my journey into the world of the wargame,  is being broadcast on BBC Radio 4 over three consecutive Wednesdays; 11th  April, 18th April, and 25th April; if you’re in the US, the episodes are available 8 days after transmission here.