There Won't Be War

There Won’t Be War Edited by Harry Harrison and Bruce McAllister

Introduction

Just before this book went to print, I turned to my oldest daughter, Annie, who was sitting beside me in the car, and asked her:

“Would you read a book about peace?”

She hesitated, that cautious look that eleven-year-olds often have in her eye. “I don’t know ...”

I thought I understood and I said: “Because it might not be exciting enough?”

“No ... I’m wondering what it would be about, Daddy.”

“What do you mean?”

“What would the book really be about?”

I lied. “About a peaceful world, I guess—people living in harmony, getting along, respecting one another.”

There was a long pause. “I’d rather,” she said at last, “read about how we got there. How we made a world like that ....”

This from an eleven-year-old. Maybe there’s hope after all.

“Thank you,” I said. “That’s exactly what my good friend Harry and I have put together—a book about the struggle for peace, not peace itself. I do hope you like k.”

I’d been expecting, as Harry knows, the reaction of so many adult readers to peace—or for that matter, to Utopias, those perfect societies we keep making in fiction that somehow never ring quite true: “Why would I want to read about perfect harmony?” we hear. “There’s no conflict, no drama. It’s boring, isn’t it?”

No, it isn’t. It’s actually the most exciting idea in the world. But far too many people just don’t think peace is possible. We don’t believe that human beings—by their nature—can achieve harmony, can reach everlasting peace on a global (let alone a domestic or personal) scale. Looking Backward, that 19th Century Utopia that invented credit cards, feels like an essay, reads like a joke—while Brave New World, Nineteen Eighty-Four and Anthem, all of those antiutopies we keep on reading decade after decade, somehow feel more real to us ... truer.

Is it simply that we believe a vision of global peace denies what makes us human, and is therefore a lie—or is it that, in historical terms (no matter how many interludes of peace we’ve had over the millennia) we’ve always known war, and fiction must echo that “reality”? Is it that, as human beings, we’re doomed never to make everlasting peace—or is it simply that we distrust ourselves, that we’re cynical, the way any idealist who very much wants something and never gets it in life becomes cynical—though indeed we do have the potential to make peace?

The latter is more hopeful certainly.

Even with Gorbachev and glasnost and the opening of Eastern Europe, we remain distrustful. It’s a lie, a temporary fantasy, a Soviet manipulation, at best an attempt that will fail. Perhaps because to assume otherwise—to have faith in our own best nature as intelligent, caring human beings—may set us up for disappointment once again in the long history of the world?

That very distrust, however—that cynicism, as we continue to dream our dreams of peace—may tell us more about what it means to be human than we realize.

It may tell us that there is indeed hope ... because, though we stumble, though we fear and distrust and are disappointed, we keep on dreaming. The dream, though we often misuse it, pulls us on. The dream within us is as real as our failure historically to reach it, and in turn must therefore be a “reality” deep within our neural wiring that good fiction should, must, and always will address as well.

When an eleven-year-old prefers reading about how we can get there, there is indeed hope. She could have said: “I'd rather read about perfect harmony, Daddy—I don’t care how we get there.” And that would have been hideous, wouldn’t it.

There’s hope too, because, boring though the thought of peaceful fiction may be to readers who prefer hostaged submarines or Cold War assassinations, you, dear reader, did pick this book up.

You must have had a reason.

What you’re holding is a book about the struggle for peace—about what it means to be human, about how an honest, thoughtful recognition of what we are as human beings can show us the way toward a real peace. Not an easily dreamt peace, no—not one where men and women lie down lobotomized in the garden of Eden with lambs and lions and somehow, in the process, lose their very humanity—but a peace achieved in the face of their humanity ... apples, serpents, fear, rage, prejudice, and all. Intelligence is the key, of course—but so are trust, compassion, respect, and a very real recognition of the paradoxes, the conflicts within us, that make us human. The struggle isn’t easy, but then it shouldn’t be: a peace without struggle is no real human victory. Nothing in life is. That’s one of the things that makes us human ....