Anyone running a doctor's office or any other kind of establishment with a waiting room should consider providing reading material their clients will enjoy. So many of these waiting rooms are either empty or filled with women's reading material. Military fiction books and magazines are especially popular among men and boys. Perhaps the fellows are stealing war books from lobbies nationwide. If not, office managers would do well to order some war stories.
The genre has a few broad conventions, to be followed or tweaked depending upon the writer's nerve. Typically, characters will be uniformed soldiers, sometimes against a backdrop of war, but more often right in the thick of it. The tale might be told in first person narrative but there will usually be quite a large cast of characters, sometimes including anonymous masses in battle. Fans of this genre usually appreciate detail when it comes to weaponry and equipment together with creativity in imaging tactics.
The genre has no firm borders, though, and can be said to embrace much fantasy and science fiction within itself. Space opera is the most popular subgenre of science fiction, and what distinguishes it is almost completely soldierly. It is the subgenre of science fiction that is full of characters whose first names are Captain and Lieutenant and who shoot beam weapons at each other, spaceships shooting at other spaceships, and ordinary tactics exaggerated by futuristic technology.
Military space opera dominates the SF field to where many casual readers assume it to be the whole of the genre. One can understand the plight of technologically sophisticated, "hard" science fiction lovers who wish it were not so. Further, it goes without saying that the fantasy genre is nearly overwhelmed with armored soldiers on horseback, defending some walled city or other.
The whole genre of secret agent stories might also be understood as a sub-category of military stories. In this account, spy stories have the same relationship to war stories that espionage holds to the regular armed forces. The spy story can be thought of as a kind of military story dedicated to a particular theater of combat, fought by a particular kind of soldier. It would be analogous to fiction that focuses on naval battles, or special forces combat.
Many parents might be reluctant to expose their children to realistic war stories for fear of glamorizing violence or even inspiring them to enlist. They might be relieved to know there is less risk exposing young people to violence in written media rather than there is in the immediate shock provided by TV and film. These days, a parent might hesitate before restricting almost any decent material that might influence their child toward a life of reading.
It isn't unusual for children to become obsessive toward a single genre. Girls and boys both enjoy the fantasy genre. A dash of high tech and it turns into SF. Boys favoring more realistic reading material often favor war literature almost exclusively, at least for a period of time.
Tales of war have excited men and boys since the Trojan War and no doubt longer than that. It isn't difficult to grasp the objections of thoughtful parents. But distributing this material in lobbies and bookshelves might inspire boys to learn to read and inspire older men not to skip their medical appointments.
The genre has a few broad conventions, to be followed or tweaked depending upon the writer's nerve. Typically, characters will be uniformed soldiers, sometimes against a backdrop of war, but more often right in the thick of it. The tale might be told in first person narrative but there will usually be quite a large cast of characters, sometimes including anonymous masses in battle. Fans of this genre usually appreciate detail when it comes to weaponry and equipment together with creativity in imaging tactics.
The genre has no firm borders, though, and can be said to embrace much fantasy and science fiction within itself. Space opera is the most popular subgenre of science fiction, and what distinguishes it is almost completely soldierly. It is the subgenre of science fiction that is full of characters whose first names are Captain and Lieutenant and who shoot beam weapons at each other, spaceships shooting at other spaceships, and ordinary tactics exaggerated by futuristic technology.
Military space opera dominates the SF field to where many casual readers assume it to be the whole of the genre. One can understand the plight of technologically sophisticated, "hard" science fiction lovers who wish it were not so. Further, it goes without saying that the fantasy genre is nearly overwhelmed with armored soldiers on horseback, defending some walled city or other.
The whole genre of secret agent stories might also be understood as a sub-category of military stories. In this account, spy stories have the same relationship to war stories that espionage holds to the regular armed forces. The spy story can be thought of as a kind of military story dedicated to a particular theater of combat, fought by a particular kind of soldier. It would be analogous to fiction that focuses on naval battles, or special forces combat.
Many parents might be reluctant to expose their children to realistic war stories for fear of glamorizing violence or even inspiring them to enlist. They might be relieved to know there is less risk exposing young people to violence in written media rather than there is in the immediate shock provided by TV and film. These days, a parent might hesitate before restricting almost any decent material that might influence their child toward a life of reading.
It isn't unusual for children to become obsessive toward a single genre. Girls and boys both enjoy the fantasy genre. A dash of high tech and it turns into SF. Boys favoring more realistic reading material often favor war literature almost exclusively, at least for a period of time.
Tales of war have excited men and boys since the Trojan War and no doubt longer than that. It isn't difficult to grasp the objections of thoughtful parents. But distributing this material in lobbies and bookshelves might inspire boys to learn to read and inspire older men not to skip their medical appointments.
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