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.
Appropriately, the military genre seems to conduct frequent raids into its neighbors' territory. It has certainly swallowed up a great deal of science fiction and fantasy. The most widely published and successfully filmed science fiction sub-genre remains space opera, and everything that makes it unique is war related. Of all science fiction's sub-genres it is by far the likeliest to have characters who are in some uniformed armed force, as well as fleets of spaceships attaching each other, and gunfights using energy weapons.
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 entire genre of espionage literature can be classified a sub-genre of war literature. This classification has espionage literature playing the same role with war literature that espionage agencies play among a nation's armed forces. Nearly any fictional intelligence agent of note has a background story of service in the combat arms, and were at some point identified from within that pool of fighting men. Most still hold rank.
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 is common among children to focus obsessively upon a particular genre. Sometimes it is girls and fantasy, with its dragons and wizards. Add technological elements and it becomes science fiction. Boys who need more realism sometimes seem to tune in to war stories and little else when it comes to reading material.
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.
Appropriately, the military genre seems to conduct frequent raids into its neighbors' territory. It has certainly swallowed up a great deal of science fiction and fantasy. The most widely published and successfully filmed science fiction sub-genre remains space opera, and everything that makes it unique is war related. Of all science fiction's sub-genres it is by far the likeliest to have characters who are in some uniformed armed force, as well as fleets of spaceships attaching each other, and gunfights using energy weapons.
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 entire genre of espionage literature can be classified a sub-genre of war literature. This classification has espionage literature playing the same role with war literature that espionage agencies play among a nation's armed forces. Nearly any fictional intelligence agent of note has a background story of service in the combat arms, and were at some point identified from within that pool of fighting men. Most still hold rank.
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 is common among children to focus obsessively upon a particular genre. Sometimes it is girls and fantasy, with its dragons and wizards. Add technological elements and it becomes science fiction. Boys who need more realism sometimes seem to tune in to war stories and little else when it comes to reading material.
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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