The Peace War

Suppose, for one glorious moment, that humanity finally solved war. Not with wisdom, mercy, international cooperation, or any of the other decorative nonsense people put in speeches shortly before ordering more tanks, but with a machine that can wrap inconvenient things in perfect, impenetrable silver bubbles.

That is the central act of genius, vandalism and bureaucratic overreach in Vernor Vinge’s The Peace War: the bobbler. Point it at a missile base, a battlefield, a troublesome aircraft, or presumably a committee that has gone on too long, and — pop — it is sealed away from the universe. Nothing gets in. Nothing gets out. Time itself sits down and waits politely. Naturally, the people who control this device decide they are the Peace Authority, because “The Immensely Well-Armed People Who Have Frozen Everyone Else’s Toys” lacks dignity on official letterhead.

Decades later, the world is very peaceful indeed, in the same way a museum is peaceful if you ignore the fact that everything inside is dead, labelled, and not allowed to touch anything. Progress has been put on a ration. Tinkering is suspicious. Cleverness is practically a criminal tendency. The future, having been deemed too risky, has been replaced with a sort of enforced shabby respectability: patch it, mend it, hide it in a shed, and for heaven’s sake don’t invent anything that might make the authorities nervous.

Unfortunately for the Peace Authority, people remain disgustingly curious. Somewhere in the undergrowth of civilisation, old scientists, young prodigies, illegal mechanics and assorted difficult persons are doing what difficult persons always do: taking things apart, putting them back together, and discovering that the official version of reality has several loose screws. The bobbles, those shiny little monuments to “permanent” control, may not be quite as permanent as advertised. History, it turns out, has not been abolished. It has merely been stored in a very expensive tin.

Vinge gives you a future where peace has become a police action, science has gone feral, and rebellion looks less like a noble uprising than a group of dangerously competent people muttering over equipment they absolutely should not have. It is hard SF with mud on its boots: full of ideas sharp enough to cut the packaging, but also wonderfully aware that the grand destiny of mankind often depends on who has the better gadget and who lied most convincingly about it.

This Pan Books paperback is in Good condition, meaning it has survived the usual democratic humiliations of age, shelving, handling and existence. It has not, as far as Crappy Old Books can determine, been sealed in a bobble since 1984, though that would explain the vintage charm. A fine little artefact of paranoid futurism, ideal for anyone who enjoys the phrase “world peace” best when followed by “and now everything is much worse.”

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