AustLit

Author's note: 'This story was inspired, if that is the word, by the film, Star Wars, which, when I saw it, dismayed and depressed me. This film threw virtually every SF cliche into its pot, and tarted them all up with special effects to achieve a gift-wrapped package that contained no gift. A culminating pain of this experience was a so-called 'space' battle, which engaged 'space' craft in typical World War II fighterplane duelling...Speculating upon the possibility of a reality in space combat, we rather might assume that opponents at best may be hundreds of kilometres apart, and that their tactics towards mutual destruction should rely heavily upon symbiosis between man, computer, and highly sophisticated weaponry...'