Fighting arenas, entertainment, brawny competitions, zero-G. In this series on fight scenes in the weightlessness of zero-G, the piece described research on movement and martial arts in zero-G, as well as some depictions of zero-G fights in film and TV. One of the references was a potential reality TV show concept called Galactic Combat, where an MMA fight in the cage gets taken into zero-G space for the final showdown. How about a zero-G fighting competition in fiction? Well, look no further than Fonda Lee’s novel, Zeroboxer.

Hardboiled eggs, raw almonds, and bran muffins comprise the breakfast of champions—floating, flying, and punching champions—especially zero-G “athletic phenom” ones named Carr Luka. Rather than the octagon cage or boxing ring, the contenders in this narrative fight in the Cube, with Carr bracing against the walls and right angles for leverage.

The combatants twist, soar and wrap legs around each other in mid-air. And yes, they push off each other with connections and blows, strategizing the forces of physics, preparing the next move, and then coming in for the rebound. While the first half of the novel comprises these aerial moves in zero-G, the second half of the novel takes the fight to Mars, where weight due to existing gravity is a novel factor—and challenge—to contend with.

Another high-profile fighting arena in the realm of sci-fi is the battleroom of Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game. Like Zeroboxer, the fight happens in an arena, pre-arranged with rules, a competition with sport-like attributes of win-conditions (with the end-goal of opening gates of the opposing team). Unlike Zeroboxer, the event is a war game, tactical team-oriented mock-battle training for combat outside the ring (or cage or Cube). After letting go of one of the many handholds along the side of the battleroom, Ender’s initial encounter was not described as grace, but more disorientation than eventual adjustment. In his debut, Ender tumbled about, flew across the room, flipped head over heels several times, and rebounded off walls, until he gained some purchase and got control of the situation. Once Ender was more adjusted to zero-G, the teammates then used one another as leverage, facing and pushing off one another as a way to maneuver.

Additionally, the team’s training weapons of choice were guns, compared to toy guns in the text, that lit up and froze their target. Unlike bullet-loaded guns, there wasn’t a recoil after shooting them, so there was no floating off in the other direction with each shot. The film also didn’t show recoil of these weapons either. Instead, the competitors launched off each other and soared until they reached stars (diamond-shaped objects). From there, they’d kick off and grab the guns to shoot and freeze the opposing team members.

As mentioned in Part I of this series, and similarly in the zero-G scenes in the film, Inception, cables and harnesses also held up the actors in Ender’s Game to create realistic zero-G shots. The shots were then edited digitally, including adding digital renditions of characters to footage and repositioning content to achieve realism in the physics of the flying, shooting, and spinning, as Mekado Murphy’s article “Building the Battle Room for ‘Ender’s Game’” describes.

If there aren’t fancy, futuristic laser-like not-laser guns, like in Ender’s Game, then at least show us some interesting projectiles, which are gun-like in that they don’t require so much full-body movement to effectively deliver a forceful impact.

Dan Wells does just this, exhibiting a few interesting projectiles ejected from hands and gliding about in zero-G glory in his middle grade novel, Zero G. (To be fair, there are also stun guns in the novel Zero G, which I imagine act similarly to Ender Game’s freezing guns.) Zero G depicts an innovative and plucky protagonist Su-shu “Zero” Huang, standing up to space pirates through essentially food fighting and projectiles. The food fights could be interpreted as biological warfare in a way, since in one scene, a straw is used as a blowdart (a makeshift targeted projectile) loaded with a revolting payload of pathogenic bacteria-laden tomato sauce into an opponent’s burrito. The effects of food poisoning ensue—and this is not a particularly fun experience for anyone in outer space (or anywhere). Throughout his sojourn in outer space, released early from his sleeping pod as others doze away, Zero effectively embraces zero-G in Home Alone-type antics to counter the bad guys.

Noting that liquid can disperse into tiny floating droplets as a cloud in zero-G, he pitches cans that release paint onto unsuspecting faces and tosses a jar of jalapeños to create a particularly spicy fog that the villainous space pirate gets right in the eyes (which would likely add to a litany of potentially preexisting ocular issues zero-G has ravaged on the person, including the swelling of the optic nerve, vision blurriness, and flattening of the back of the eye as symptoms of Spaceflight-Associated Neuro-Ocular Syndrome—a syndrome that NASA claims affects 70% of orbiting astronauts).

Of course, the bad guys have stun guns—and makeshift chains, similar to the flexible weapons-like lassos of David D. Levine’s conception, The Kuiper Belt, which this article will get into a bit later. Ever clever, Zero also employs striking through improvised weapons such as a flashlight to smash fingers. As someone who owns tactical pens and flashlights, and has trained in using water bottles, tree branches, and umbrellas, this scrappiness and creativeness in weaponry appeals to me. Hits to the fingers add practicality, as Zero essentially “defangs the snake,” effectively hindering his opponent in the use of their hands to hit or grab weapons, neutralizing the immediate threat.

“Defanging the snake” is a term that harks from Filipino Martial Arts (kali, arnis and eskrima, also spelled escrima) and Neal Stephenson’s Seveneves references the use of escrima in zero gravity space, as well as grappling arts and taser-use.

In Seveneves, the training room is the Circus, a module for exercising. In a practice session of wrestling in the Circus between Markus and Tekla and some onlookers, Tekla executes a hold on Markus and then they drift apart after Tekla releases her hold. The onlookers discuss various forms of martial arts and conclude that grappling arts such as Sambo, “jujitsu or wrestling or bökh” are possible in zero-G, but perhaps sans the throws that rely on weight onto the ground. (In a similar vein on holds and submissions, The Expanse by James S.A. Corey also features low gravity jujitsu, as Julie Mao, an expert pilot gone missing in the series, is described as a purple belt in the art.)

After the discussion of the aforementioned grappling arts in Seveneves, the onlooking characters raise other martial arts in their discussion. While stickfighting, as part of escrima is mentioned, the characters also note the lack of sticks for training in their zero-G environment, concomitant with the paucity of trees.

The conversation then moves to tasers and the problems they would engender, with a minority having them and a majority going unarmed, alongside concerns about public safety, public perception, and social inequities, in addition to the matter of the physics of weaponry deployment. (For the purposes of this article, however, I would categorize these tasers in the same category as stun guns of Zero G and the freeze guns of Ender’s Game—handheld and quick deployment through a trigger system with little recoil—for ease of use in zero-G fights.)

While the depiction of laser-like incapacitating guns and stun guns in the works mentioned thus far don’t involve a recoil, Tobias Buckell’s Ragamuffindoes employ recoil from guns to the user’s advantage. In a gun fight through a space station, the characters use these weapons to counter adversaries as well as propel themselves, specifically to get across an entire habitat in the station. Nashara uses a minigun and eventually a small machine gun, while spinning, the aerial whirling of her body reminding her of night parachute jumps. She deliberately fired shots to position herself, the sunline as a guide for perceiving directionality and orientation.

Buckell’s characters also discuss enduring the nausea involved in spinning about, “Just don’t look anywhere,” one of the characters advises. And the characters close their eyes as they spin, for a portion of the high-adrenaline fight and flight. Besides nausea, disorientation, and the threat of violence, they also must contend with the floating debris. Windows exploding from gunfire become menacing clouds of tiny glass projectiles, as pernicious flechettes.

In my research for this series, I was curious to see if there were tasers designed for use in space missions but didn’t come up with many. Given the multitude of science fictional fights that involve floating clouds of debris, a taser in space would probably be best protected from dust or flotsam-particulate entry and floating droplets of liquid. Axon’s Taser 10 deploys ten probes at once and their website boasts of the product’s superior weather protection, dust invulnerability, and the ability to operate even after half an hour of submersion in a meter of water.

Another plan introduced by the same company takes the tasers out of fleshy human hands and onto metal flying bots, i.e. the use of tasers on drones. The mention of drones reminds me of various rovers deployed on planetary missions, robots deployed on space stations (see my article on space bees in Clarkesworld Issue 212), and drones use Earthside and in futuristic use on Mars through NASA.

Granted, some of these arenas for robotics are in full or partial gravity, not zero-G, but one can imagine zero-G applications of soaring metal bots, not necessarily propelled by rotor blades.

However, the tech was put on hold, although Dina Temple-Raston in The Record reports that the CEO has presented on the idea thereafter. The controversy surrounding the drone-use is due in part to the objective of its use; the plan for taser-weaponized drones was proposed as a response and solution to school shootings. The article discusses that such a plan was never implemented, as the company’s AI Ethics Board eventually shot down the proposal, given the risk of the drones at school grounds, how the tech could be abused, and the dehumanization of targets in the proposed scenario. Indeed, weaponized drone use in combat and civilian scenarios is a fraught subject, portrayed in science fictional dystopias and as some would argue current real-life dystopias (and warrants more attention beyond the scope of this article focused on fights portrayed in science fiction).

Tasers are also fraught pieces of technology, as Kameelah Janan Rasheed says in an interview with Kiese Laymon, with an author credit of Mensah Demary and published in Specter, “ . . . technology, be it branding, forced sterilization, the Tuskegee experiment, or tasers, is too often brought to bear on black bodies.”

Hand-to-hand combat in science-fictional futures also involves science fictional weapons beyond tasers and freeze guns, created and promulgated by authors’ vivid imaginations.

In a recent interview, David Levine talks about how much fun it was designing the zero-G casino of his novel The Kuiper Belt. This casino acts as the setting of the zero-G fight in the book. Levine describes drawing from his own free-falling experience and mentions consulting with a martial arts expert which ultimately led to the development of the fight scenes and weapons technology. In Levine’s weightlessness scenario, casino guards wield lassos that cinch with a button push, and the main character Kane subverts their usage by using the weaponry against them. Although the technology works differently from a projectile, there are some aspects that are like a gun or taser in previously mentioned books, as the mechanism involves a trigger-deployed system to make the weapon more effective in zero-G, so that there is little recoil for its usage.

The close combat encounters also involve spinning, like many of the other mentioned fights in science fiction. In this case, the first-person narrator of this section, Kane, spins an opponent to get the person to the best orientation for a delivery of a kick. Kane braces this kick with a foot on a nearby guideline (a device to help customers orient and maneuver themselves in the casino space).

As for hand-to-hand striking combat without weapons, punches in zero-G space (as depicted in Ender’s Game teammates pushing off each other) involve Newton’s Third Law of motion which states that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.

The novel Stardance by Spider and Jeanne Robinson, takes modern and post-modern dance styles into outer space and includes an aggressive encounter in addition to graceful, whirling, and evocative dance encounters. Main character Charlie Armstead, in a fit of rage close to the end of the novella, headbutts space industrialist Bryce Carrington in the sternum. Never mind the provocation, it involves Carrington expelling and forcibly dismissing dancer Shara back to Earth, for the sake of PR in the orbiting Skyfac facility in which she was dancing and filming. The belt that tethers the chair Carrington sits on snaps from the impact of Armstead’s headbutt. Armstead then delivers a right punch to Carrington. Armstead’s narration of the physics is to call Bryce’s head a “bounce up from the floor” like a basketball, but in the “slow motion” of lower gravitation. The equal and opposite reaction was Armstead’s trajectory in the other direction.

Besides the punch scene, there are discussions of gun use in the larger series. One character Chen Ten Li who confesses he needs a “vertical” to orient himself, divulges his fear and anxiety in zero-G in a traumatic event when the lights went out and he had to look for the switch.

As for combative encounters, Armstead asks if Chen would use the automatic to shoot Sheldon Silverman, an American diplomat, if push came to shove to preserve the human race from this character’s portrayed greed. Chen mentions he had already tossed the gun out of the airlock because of the absurdity of its use in freefall and favors back-breaking as a way to take the person out (a rather disconcerting admission, I’d say, in its bluntness).

Besides these portrayals and discussions of physical combat, another aspect of physiology broached in this work are the deleterious effects of zero-G, which takes a toll on Shara, the dancer, who collapses in the airlock earlier in the series. The characters also discuss the similarity of martial arts to dancing in the first novel when considering the bee-like movements of aliens (yes, dancing aliens appear in the narrative), and one character Tom McGillicuddy mentions his former job as a karate instructor.

In the series, dance and references to martial arts in zero-G intertwine conceptually as movement, and these movements must be coordinated to achieve their intended effect, whether that is sublime expression or combative expression.

This article series has raised quite a few fictional instances of the physics of martial arts and innovative weapon deployment in zero-G with notable spins, twirls and soars—both within the competitive cage and without. Time will tell how many of these weapons and techniques will make it out into space stations and zero-G arenas.

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