Wars We Never Fought

A collection of essays examining how armed conflict functions as a subject, theme, metaphor, symbol, or plot device in popular works of speculative fiction, including novels, films, television, and video games.

Speculative fiction – genres such as science fiction, fantasy, utopian/dystopian, apocalyptic/post-apocalyptic, supernatural, horror, superhero, and alternative history – is, at this particular cultural moment, incontrovertibly popular. Despite the fact that war and its social, cultural, political, and moral consequences are often a driving force in speculative fiction narratives, exerting outsized influence on character development, structuring plot and conflict, and serving as a vehicle to explore various themes, there has been little critical attention given specifically to the intersection of these concepts.

Wars We Never Fought remedies this problem, as contributors analyze such popular texts as the Star Wars franchise, Ann Leckie's Imperial Radch trilogy, Dune, Mary Doria Russell's The Sparrow and Children of God, The Expanse series, Captain Marvel, and the Fallout game franchise. These essays offer accessible and wide-ranging critical insight into how and why creators of speculative fiction use war as a device within the diegetic worlds of their stories. They also look at what the depictions of war and warriors within these texts suggest regarding notions such as race, class, gender, sexuality, difference, sociopolitical power, and other cultural values.

Contextualizing the culture in which these narratives are created and consumed, Wars We Never Fought demonstrates how the textual dramatization of entirely fictitious wars might reflect, interrogate, and even structure understanding of warfare in the “real world.”