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.

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