"We Has Found the Enemy and They Is Us": Virtual War and Empathy in Four Children's Science Fiction Novels

The article explores four science fiction novels aimed at children which feature virtual wars: Gillian Rubinstein's Space Demons, Terry Pratchett's Only You Can Save Mankind, Robert Westall's Gulf and Gloria Skurzynski's Virtual War. Each of these have a sense of the unreality of contemporary warfare as explored in Jean Baudrillard's "The Gulf War Did Not Take Place," and the Pratchett and the Westall volumes explicitly reference the 1991 Gulf War. In each of the four cases violence is rejected in favor of an ethical concern for the Other, which the articles discusses in terms of Emmanuel Levinas' philosophy.