I’ve noticed that Twitter is regularly aflame with heated debates about the SF cannon, and what and what is not contained within it. While I have not taken the time to follow these discussions in depth (or indeed at all), I confess to be puzzled by my skimming of the first few words of the tweets. Surely, cannons being such a well-established feature of terrestrial warfare, such weapons of war should be well represented within science fiction? Indeed, this is the case, as the following works demonstrate…
From the Earth to the Moon: A Direct Route in 97 Hours, 20 Minutes (French: De la Terre à la Lune, trajet direct en 97 heures 20 minutes) by Jules Verne (1865)
A very early example of the sub-genre. The vast Columbiad cannon described in Verne’s novel is the result of a project undertaken by the Baltimore Gun Club to launch a projectile at the Moon. In the absence of the rocket technology of a century later, it was only natural that the club should invest in something familiar: an artillery piece, but of unusual size.
Verne does his best to convince readers that the effort is, if not plausible, then still something a collection of colourful firearm enthusiasts might believe was plausible. Only a cur would point out that the accelerations involved should reduce any passengers to a thin, sticky film before they exited the gun barrel.
The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress by Robert A. Heinlein (1966)
The space cannon that drives much of the novel’s plot is actually repurposed transportation infrastructure. Having established prisoner-staffed farms on the Moon, the Authority needs some means to deliver cargo cheaply and reliably to Earth. Thanks to the airless Moon’s low escape velocity, the answer is a magnetic accelerator, able to throw cargos just hard enough to escape lunar gravity but softly enough to be captured by the Earth’s. The prisoners, tired of servitude and convinced that Authority policies will bring famine, simply replace wheat with rocks and let orbital velocities and Ek = ½ MV2 deliver tactical-nuke-grade rebukes to the Earth.
Sad to say, Heinlein provides too many details—always a temptation with this sort of thing—allowing readers with copies of The Effects of Nuclear Weapons to calculate the height of the impact waves generated by these rocks (a couple of inches) and to figure out how many impacts it would take to reduce Cheyenne Mountain to a memory (hundreds of thousands). Most readers apparently don’t own Effects and were convinced by Heinlein, which led to a long SFnal tradition of writing about terrifying orbital kinetic weapons.
Skyripper by David Drake
Conveniently for the United States of America, while Professor Vlasov developed his innovative method of transforming H-bomb output into directed particle beams while working for the Soviets, the professor is a crank. Convinced aliens are going to invade, equally convinced that the Soviets cannot turn his concept into reality fast enough to save Earth, he will provide the Americans with his ideas (if an American agent can deliver him alive to the US).
More conventional cannons enter into the professor’s plans in an unconventional way. The US’s rocket resources would not be sufficient to deliver the professor’s gadgets to orbit in quantities large enough to save Earth. The professor’s suggestion?
These are small packages, I tell you. Shoot them into orbit. Twenty years ago, you and the Canadians were doing this, two battleship cannon end to end…. How could the aliens invade when the Earth is ready to fire scores of new defensive satellites into orbit in a few hours?
“Under the Covenant Stars” by John Barnes (1988)
The United States and the Soviet Union having invested eye-watering sums in nuclear arms, it was only logical that they would one day use them on each other. Once the decision to attack had been made, subsequent human history would have consisted of a lot of screaming, followed by a long, loud silence. A perfect plan, except for those pesky Canadians…
Curiously unwilling to be collateral damage in US/Soviet apocalypse, Canada1 secretly deployed twenty large nuclear devices at the bottom of upward-facing shafts filled with debris. Detonation filled low Earth orbit with debris. Missiles could no longer get through, while bombers took long enough for governments to have second thoughts. Canada had saved the world—an act for which it would be comprehensively punished.
The Expanse (series) by James S. A. Corey (2011–2022)
Corey’s recently completed series provides its fleets of warships with suitable SFnal weapons, ranging from fusion-powered missiles to weaponized alien technology. All very thematically appropriate for an epic kicked off when sociopaths decide that alien relics, reverse engineered and deployed, are just what the Solar System needs.
Conventional projectile-firing cannon do play a role in this series, in the form of computer-controlled point defense cannons. Hitting an evasive target like an incoming missile is nearly impossible with a single shot. The PDCs address this with thousands of rounds a minute, only one of which needs to get lucky to save their ship. Moreover, the PDCs are quite useful for smaller, closer targets.
***
These five works of cannon SF came readily to mind, suggesting there are far more out there for me to find (in the event that I ever decide to stop doomscrolling Twitter). No doubt you cherish some favourite examples of cannon SF. Comments are, as ever, below.
In the words of fanfiction author Musty181, prolific book reviewer and perennial Darwin Award nominee James Davis Nicoll “looks like a default mii with glasses.” His work has appeared in Publishers Weekly and Romantic Times as well as on his own websites, James Nicoll Reviews (where he is assisted by editor Karen Lofstrom and web person Adrienne L. Travis) and the 2021 and 2022 Aurora Award finalist Young People Read Old SFF (where he is assisted by web person Adrienne L. Travis). He is a four-time finalist for the Best Fan Writer Hugo Award, and is surprisingly flammable.
[1]It’s kind of weird that Canada would come up twice in an essay not specifically discussing Canada. Even once is a bit excessive.
James, you are a bad, bad, man.
I have loved The Moon is a Harsh Mistress for many many years!!
TANSTASFL!!
Regarding The Expanse, the Roci uses her railgun to <spoiler> in Cibola Burn. The math looks a bit iffy. And more traditionally to <spoiler> in Babylon’s Ashes.
“Hellfire” by Jean Johnson has a mile long electromagnetic cannon in a space cruiser captained by a precognitive to minimize friendly fire.
I’d never really thought about this before but cannonically speaking, fantasy is much more significant than SF. Why, I can look from my desk to my bookcase and spot a lot of cannon fantasy – Diana Wynne Jones’s Dalemark Quartet, Lloyd Alexander’s early modern Westmark trilogy, Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell and of course Gene Wolfe’s Book of the Long Sun, and that’s just to start. I suppose that SF probably has a larger cannon on technical points, though.
Jordan/Sanderson – Cannons feature significantly in A Memory of Light, on top of other canonical elements in this series ender.
Powers’ The Drawing of the Dark features numerous cannon, one of which suffers rapid disassembly on being fired.
Christopher Priest’s The Space Machine, a sequel to both War of the Worlds and The Time Machine, has the Martians using cannons to launch their invasion fleet (as well as, unintentionally, the protagonists).
Wasn’t there a Poul Anderson story where someone used a cannon to power a makeshift ship in an asteroid field?
(And how many of you, like me, saw that title, and immediately thought ‘typo.’)
Avram Davidson’s novelette “Bumberboom”.
My mind immediately went to Newton’s Cannon by Gregory Keyes. It’s a scifi/fantasy expansion on Newton’s Cannonball thought experiment, where 17th century alchemical development allows nogoodniks to weaponize a passing comet.
Schlock Mercenary by Howard Tayler is jam-packed with cannon. To say more would invoke spoilers, so I will add only that wormholes are eventually involved.
1: I am sorry but I cannot hear you over the sound of my maniacal laughter.
Canon. Look it up.
Have you forgotten the Hellbore, main armament of the BOLO, described by Keith Laumer?
https://www.tor.com/2016/03/24/front-lines-and-frontiers-the-compleat-bolo-by-keith-laumer/
@15 for more discussion of flying objects, refer to the subreddit r/whoosh
This made me giggle all the way through.
In “Lord Kalvan of Otherwhen” some priests of Styphon get cannonized offstage. A development apparently based actions taken by the civilized British during the Great Mutiny.
“King David’s Spaceship” by Pournelle has the heroes shot into low orbit by a Verne style cannon
Fantasy more than SF, proto-steampunk but, you know, for kids – Nightbirds on Nantucket had a big goddamn cannon. Situated on Nantucket by villains plotting to attack England, the real horror was that the kickback would propel Nantucket into New York! Heaven forfend!
Sigh. It’s “canon” (a body of writings) not “cannon” (a large, mounted gun). Except maybe for the primary weapon on Keith Laumer’s BOLO’s.
#10 – typo? Only as long as it took to read the author. :)
Oh, wait, I get it. All of these books use actual “cannons”. Jules Verne’s contraption was shot out of a cannon. The Authority used linear accelerators to get grain to Earth. Keith Laumer’s BOLO’s. And so on.
So, the author’s not illiterate. He’s just making a series of very bad puns. Not sure if that’s worse. But well played in any event!
The Safehold series by David Weber is about people literally reinventing the cannon and other gunpowder technology as well as pushing through technology improvements in 5-10 or so years that took hundreds of years on the first go-round on Earth. Very technical storytelling with plenty of infodumps and all the details. I enjoyed it, but it’s not for everyone.
#10: I believe I have foud the cover picture
In Tad Williams’ Shadowmarch series, the Autarch of Xis uses huge cannons in his siege of Hierosol.
Quillifer the Knight demonstrates that dragons are best slain cannonically.
Let us not forget “Bun-Bun”. the SheVa 9 cannon from John Ringo’s Polseen War Series
@19: King David’s Spaceship didn’t use a Gerald Bull-esque zero stage to orbit gun; it used the chemical explosives version of an Orion drive.
From Canons to Cannons, gonna drive me ballistic.
It is instructive to review the Wikipedia article on a real-life cannon (technically a recoilless rifle) called the Davy Crockett. Although the range of the smaller version was just 2.01 km, the projectile was a 20 tonne nuclear warhead. The firing crew was protected by use of a 22m remote detonating cord which allowed them to seek a position behind a hillock while covering their heads and necks.
I cannot believe that no one else thought of the “cannons” in E. E. “Doc” Smith’s Lensman series. Up to and including “firing” entire planets through Intertia-less Drive “tubes” to slam down on other worlds. And there was the turning of the Sun into a laser / particle beam weapon, as well. Doc had an imagination.
Heh. Those of us with the surname “Cannon” tend to quickly learn the difference between “Canon” and “Cannon”.
Of course, we’re all pretty Big Shots…..
In SFnal fantasy, Saunders’ Commonweal series comes to mind, in which magical artillery firing megaton payloads over ranges of hundreds of miles play a notable role. Plus exotic payloads such as reactive fluorine compounds or Cthulhu in a bottle.
@9: The Martians launching their invasion force by cannon is deduced by terrestrial astronomers in the first chapter of the original ‘The War of the Worlds’.
“He who would pun would pick a pocket.” Paul Bettany, Master And Commander. (At least in the film version, but that might be non-canonical.)
@37: The man who tells us how the dog watch gets its name has no room to judge other people’s puns.
@38 Take it up with Paul Bettany.
It’s in The Far Side of the World; Jack is in tears at his own wit in punning molto vivace with Johan Melchior Molter to make ”Molter Vivace”, and Stephen says ”he that would make a pun would pick a pocket, and that miserable quibble is not even a pun, but a vile clench”
It’s very Stephen to be so inconsistent, but to be fair to him he really doesn’t pun often, and was probably quite proud of himself for being able to pun on a naval term in a way the sailors hadn’t thought of.
For those dunking on the author and article over canon vs cannon, I regret to inform you that you have been self-pwned. This could have been avoided if you’d taken a moment to really read and think. In fairness I almost stepped into the trap myself, but then I double checked myself and recognized what was going on.
@41 Who did that?
Termination Shock by Neal Stephenson features some enormous cannons used for a novel purpose.
In order:
1. Note the pun in the title.
2. Scroll happily through comments for people who didn’t get the pun and are huffy. Get a smile.
3. Go back and enjoy the article. I don’t know that Barnes story, and will have to look it up.
Re your footnote:
As soon as I saw your first mention of Canada, I thought, “D’oh! ‘Under the Covenant Stars’!” And sure enough, that was the next piece you mentioned—
@45: It is a good story. I checked, and I’ve still got my copy of the issue of Asimov’s in which it first appeared.
I have sadly become accustomed to seeing “canon” being constantly misspelled as “cannon.” When I saw my favorite Heinlein novel in the illustration, I got the pun right away.
Bravo!
Since there is some discussion of puns, does anyone know the story in which research is done into why we laugh at jokes and groan at puns? The research discovers that we are all in an experiment and the experimenters insert the jokes into our world, while we invent the puns ourselves; no one ever laughs at a joke again.
@19: cannonization is merely threatened, whereupon the priests etc. recant. (One priest at a low enough level to actually believe — storywise a reason for him being at such a low level — is suppressed by the others.) Kalvan etc. have to come up quickly with an alternate entertainment: an auto-da-fé in which nobody actually dies.
@48: there might be more than one such story, but the one I remember is Isaac Asimov’s “Jokester“.
Where are the ladies at? C.J. Cherryh? Le Guin? L’Engle? Butler?
Also, nice pun.
I drew a blank on novels by women (and non-binary authors) that prominently featured cannons. I am sure I overlooked some but also pretty sure none of the examples I overlooked were by Le Guin. She really didn’t seem like an artillery-friendly author.
Also Niven/Pournelle in Mote in God’s Eye:
Didn’t the Moties use a series of laser cannon to start the light sail ship off? And the discharge showed up on the other side as the Mote, until it turned off?
Philip K Dick The Gun.
WJW’s Praxis series and follow-ups like “The Accidental War” has all kinds of point defense cannon
@15 Canon. Look it up.
FYI, if you’re looking up it, it’s likely only somebody else’s head cannon.
@53 The Larry Niven story that springs to my mind is “All the Bridges Rusting,” featuring a magnetic accelerator used as sort of anti-cannon.
Kelly Link, “The Cannon” (in Magic For Beginners)
@37 & 40 Well, the movie version might be non-canonical, but certainly not non-cannonical. Meanwhile, Stephen is just grumpy because he failed to choose the lesser of two weevils.
Megan E O’Keefe Velocity Weapon.?
@52 James Davis Nicholl, I won’t swear to it, but I’d bet both The Word For the World Is Forest and Four Ways to Forgiveness by Ursula Le Guin feature cannons, or some close analog. She was the furthest thing in the world From a military sf writer, of course–only, she really wasn’t, as she could hardly critique militarism without portraying it, could she?
@60 Purple library Guy, Agreed, Master And Commander, the movie might not be canonical, but it’s most cannonical.
One I realized it was a pun not a typo, my first thought of SF cannons was Star Blazers and the wave motion gun. It’s not a novel, but I’m sure there’s a manga version out there somewhere.
I like another canon/cannon pun or miscommunication.
I long was confused with the term head-canon, and perhaps this comic image from Fletcher Hanks is responsible.
This is what I think of when I hear ‘head-canon’; I mean, we can’t hear the extra ‘n’!
–
I read so much David Drake as a youth and reread those Sam Kelly stories, Skyripper and Fortress. But I thought that I liked them because as a youth I had no taste. What is Drake’s reputation? I found his novels set in Roman times were well researched. And I loved the violence! That violence I like so much is usually the way I know the material is good writing. I would love to be wrong on this.
So, David Drake: a leader in science fiction and fantasy circles or lucky hack? I want him to be a good writer because that might mean I have some good taste.
@@@@@#25, 64. YA 2 more examples of overgroan bosooms in SPAAACE! @@@@@#25, not at all surprised to see AB Chandler make an appearance…..
James: thanks for this. Malice aforethought on Canon vs Cannon! You got quite a few takers, too!
Does the peasant railgun count? I mean, sure, the concept is absurd, but if you look here, here, and here you’ll surely agree it is the clear intention of the rules.
In Dune, cannons are the surprise weapon used against Atreides soldiers hiding in caves. They thought they were safe because kinetic weapons were shielded against and lasers were death for the users, but with cannons the Harkonnen just brought the caves down around them.
My big issue with Heinlein’s lunar cannon is not his sloppy physics (his canon has a lot of that) but his ignoring the probable collateral damage of throwing rocks at a densely-inhabited planet. Indeed, the Loonies who dissent from the decision to bombard Earth are depicted as clueless hysterics who don’t know the difference between kinetic and nuclear weapons.
Which uncomfortably echos the debates over nuclear power and nuclear weapons that was raging when The Moon is a Harsh Mistress was published, and nukophiles liked to dismiss concerns over meltdowns and nuclear war in similar gaslit terms. And right-wing pundits were smugly poo-pooing the reluctance to use “tactical” nukes in the Vietnam War.
@@@@@ chip137
Thank you Jokester is the one, I had forgotten the involvement of Multivac until I read that summary.
If I remember correctly, one of David Brin’s “Uplift War” novels tells us that dropping a line of inert dense objects across a space, say the size of an ocean-ship’s cannon ball, makes an effective mine-field for a space fleet coming out of hyperspace to trip over.
It is possible that my memory is faulty and the story is not David Brin’s but Anne McCaffrey’s (probably a later novel in the later Tower and Hive series).
Well, cannons make me think of the middle ages and siege warfare. I haven’t read it in 50 years but is there a cannon in The High Crusade by Poul Anderson. Probably not.
@@@@@ 77, Chris Noble:
Well, cannons make me think of the middle ages and siege warfare. I haven’t read it in 50 years but is there a cannon in The High Crusade by Poul Anderson. Probably not.
Not.
They did build a trebuchet. Used it to lob a nuke at an alien fortress. “That was way better than a dead horse.”
The aliens sent aircraft to spot the “cannon”. But they were set to detect metal.
At the next negotiation, “I don’t care if you do have some kind of, of detection proof cannon!”
You are reading Skyripper with a desperation born from the inherent Canadian insuperiority complex when you suddenly wonder if there could possibly be five SFF tales inspired by Gerald Bull.
Will James, you wonder, inspired by his vast knowledge, be moved to document five more cannonical works?