Writing popular fiction

with faults and virtues, hopes and fears, so the reader sympathizes with them and wishes them well; at the same time, your villains, in the war story, should not be shown to have a good side, but should be powered by an overwhelmingly evil motivation; greed for money or power, revenge, or even sheer insanity. If you show the villain with his family, or in a moment of deep personal torment, he is instantly a "gray," not a "black," and his death becomes more complicated than it otherwise might be; he begins, at that point, to retard the progress of the war story.
    In the war novel, the protagonists are sent as a commando unit into occupied territory, there to accomplish some objective such as the destruction of an enemy gun implacement not vulnerable to air bombardment (
The Guns of Navarone
by Alistair MacLean), a dam
(Force 10 From Navarone
by Alistair MacLean), a bridge, or a command headquarters hidden from aerial attack. Their every movement is an invitation to discovery, and their survival owes as much to wits as to skill with weapons.
    Ideally, the war story should have one chief protagonist surrounded by as many as four or five accomplices who are only slightly less important in the reader's eye. In the deadly atmosphere of a war, it is only reasonable to expect that some of the protagonists will die. By beginning with a large enough group, the author can whittle them down with effective death scenes and still allow the main hero and two or three others to survive.
    (If you will recall our discussion, earlier, of the sword and sorcery fantasy novel, you will see two evident parallels between that form and the war story. In both the war novel and the sword and sorcery novel, the forces which generate the plot are perfectly black and white, good and evil. And, in both, the hero's suffering is often shown, not from his own wounds, but from his reaction to the loss of close friends and comrades.)
    Warning: In the war story, it is rare that all of the heroes are killed off, and it is also undesirable. Because the reader does see the values in black and white, he wants to see the rewards properly issued, as well. If you absolutely must let your heroes die, all of them, you should make certain that their deaths are heroic and that they have accomplished all of their objectives. If they die and fail their mission, too, the
reader
will
be ready
to begin his own war on you!

SCIENTIFIC CRISIS STORIES
    These tales revolve around an impending disaster which can only be solved by,
or is a direct result of
, modern scientific methods. The crisis is often generated by mishandled or stolen bacteria cultures which are being developed in the United States germ warfare program, as in Henry Sutton's
Vector
. Or the crisis may be a biological attack on the U.S., as in James Henderson's fast-moving
Copperhead
. Or the threat may come from some bizarre source, such as outer space, as in Michael Crichton's best-selling
The Andromeda Strain
.
    Usually, your hero will be a research scientist or a medical doctor. The suspense comes from his continuing attempts to neutralize the crisis and the continual worsening of the situation despite all that is being done. To make your hero seem real and his efforts believable, you will need to study, carefully, whatever scientific background the crisis and the plot require.
    Because a layman is usually not acquainted with the basic facts of any particular science, the research for such a novel may require months, or more time than you are willing to put into it. If that is the case with your novel, but you feel the idea is still valid, reconsider the way your story was originally to be told and see if the scientist or doctor protagonist can be replaced by either an average citizen caught up in the disaster, or by an FBI or CIA agent who is trying to discover the roots of the crisis. In either case, you will need to know quite a bit of science to write the tale—but less than you would to create a believable scientist or doctor hero whose intimacy with laboratory methods and theory is difficult for a layman to properly reconstruct.

ADVENTURE STORIES
    At one time, the adventure story could be classified as a vital genre in its own right. Its material was the exploits of adventurers and explorers, men who lived at the edges of civilization and who fearlessly faced scorching deserts, high mountains, hostile natives, impenetrable jungles, savage seas, and frozen arctic wastelands. The adventure plot