The War Against the Chtorr! Review!

Since my review of The Steel Remains seemed to get a good reaction, I'll review another piece of interesting, sexually innovative, ultraviolent fiction that readers here might not have encountered otherwise.

There are four War Against the Chtorr books: A Day for Damnation, A Matter for Men, A Rage for Revenge and A Season for Slaughter. They came out in the 1980s, and I believe they're all currently out of print. However, they were fairly popular when published, so used copies are easy to find from Amazon.com or other sources.

I read two of these books when I was much younger. I thought they were great, but really disturbing. Recently, I decided to hunt down and read or reread all four of them. That's what I've been doing this last weekend instead of reading The Nurtured Heart (I could not imagine a more diametrically opposed book!) Though, oddly enough, there is a major adoption connection.

David Gerrold, the author of the War Against the Chtorr books, is perhaps best known as the screenwriter of the classic "Trouble with Tribbles" Star Trek episode. He's had a long involvement with Star Trek. His original science fiction is uneven, not consistently bestselling, but often shockingly good. He's won both the Hugo and Nebula awards. In a total departure from his usual genre work, he recently published a quasi-memoir called The Martian Child, an account of adopting an older special needs child from the foster care system, describing his experiences as a single gay adoptive father.

I respect David Gerrold for his talent and tenacity. He deserves some kind of lifetime achievement medal, perhaps entitled "Heroic Resistance in the Face of Unending Multimedia Homophobia". His creative output has been subjected to decades of de-gaying. For example, in 1987, Gene Roddenberry had promised to break the final social frontier and actually have gay people in the Star Trek universe. He asked David Gerrold to come back and write a gay-themed episode for Star Trek: The Next Generation. Gerrold wrote one. Then everyone chickened out and decided not to produce it. Gerrold quit in protest. Here's a good summary of the depressing controversy.

In 2007, The Martian Child was made into a movie starring a John Cusack. And they turned the father heterosexual. How insulting! The movie still wasn't a box-office success. I have not seen nor read The Martian Child, but after doing this research, I think I'll go ahead and order the book.

Back to the Chtorr. These books, on first glance, appear to be run-of-the-mill military science fiction. Space marine stuff. I normally cannot stand this subgenre of science fiction; it's only one step above video game novelizations in terms of formulaic dreariness. In fact, there's probably a lot of overlap between military science fiction and video games and video game novelizations. The Chtorr book covers feature space mariney people with big guns shooting at giant caterpillars, cheesy alliterative titles and a surplus of exclamation points. If you're serious about good science fiction, however, you might want to give them a second look.

The premise of the series is that the Earth is being colonized by alien lifeforms. There are no humanoids in spaceships involved. Instead, the invasion happens from the bottom up, starting at the unicellular level. Alien spores are presumed to have ridden in on meteorites. The first sign is a wave of plagues that kills three-quarters of humanity. The survivors have to deal with ecological infestations of increasing complexity and virulence. The most deadly life form is the Chtorran gastropede or "worm", an only semi-intelligent, huge, toothy caterpillar-looking monster that likes to eat its prey alive. As someone who has read a lot of armchair evolutionary biology (mainly Gould and Dawkins) the biological/ecological imagination of the series seems convincing and compelling to me, though a real biologist would probably find a ton of impossibilities.

The book is told from the point of view of Jim McCarthy, a young man who starts off the first book as part of an army group trying to research an infested area. Jim would have been in college studying biology if national emergencies hadn't funneled everyone his age into the army.

The infestation presents a scientific, economic and political puzzle as much as a military one. How is it possible to attack the Chtorrans without also destroying the native Earth ecology? In a political climate where American imperialism is distrusted by all other nations, how is the world going to form the necessary cooperative efforts? Since 75% of the world has died off, and there are a lot of commodities lying around waiting to be reclaimed, what happens to inflation? The series is marked by a refusal to paper over any of these problems in order to get the plot moving faster.

But the plot does move fast. Really fast. There's a ton of action. The worms are scary. They are not an absolute evil; in fact, the scientific component of the plot relies on trying to understand their unique motivations. By the second book, we're introduced to humans who are capable of cooperating with the worms, and we start to put the ecological puzzle pieces together, and things get really scary from that point.

Jim McCarthy is always getting into horrendously dangerous situations and then fighting his way out using incredible bravery and resourcefulness. But in all other areas of life, he's a hot mess. He's massively insecure about his sexuality. He's prone to fits of rage and despair, and when he can't take it anymore, he gets really high, and then he passes out. Every fifty pages or so he screams, collapses into sobbing, or faints, in reaction to miscellaneous (often self-inflicted) emotional trauma. His main love interest (he's bisexual) is his commanding officer, a woman who's taller than him, older than him and vocal in her irritation about having to act as his mother figure. He's a rather unique hero for a fast-paced military science fiction story, to say the least.

The third book, A Rage for Revenge, is the most disturbing, because a major theme involves traumatized children and the horrible things that can happen to them. After I finished rereading it I did some research on it and stumbled across a very illuminating comment by Gerrold.

Hanley: Now, what year did you take the EST training?
Gerrold: May of ‘81.
Hanley: And what impact did that have on your writing?
Gerrold: The most immediate impact was I got the definition of bullshit which is anything that you use to avoid accountability. So it’s rationalization and lies and excuses and justification and explanation. I was struggling with the Chtorr at that time, and I went through the manuscript with a big black marker and crossed off every sentence that was an explanation or a justification or a rationalization, every sentence that wasn’t experiential. And the book got cut way, way down, but what was left was really compelling reading. So right there I got a very clear sense of communication – that it’s about creating an authentic experience. I wanted people to feel it. I wanted them to experience it. So the most immediate effect was what I now call experiential writing. In the process of writing, I am creating experience. First, I create experience for myself then I find the words that would evoke it for the readers.

And that brings us to the est. Oh boy. For anyone who doesn't know what est is, I would suggest reading through these accounts at cult watch site rickross.com, starting with this 1975 article, "We're Gonna Tear You Down and Put You Back Together". Or you could just read A Rage for Revenge. In a special foreword to the book, Gerrold basically says, "yes, this book is didactic, but I swear, it's not est." It's est. The est makes it almost unreadable. However, I could not imagine the book without it. Est for these books is like libertarianism was for Heinlein. Heinlein and his approach to fictional didacticism were certainly a huge influence.

I agree with Gerrold that the est-inspired editing does make for really compelling reading. The book covers some incredibly disturbing ground: everything from the looming probable death of the entire human race to a situation in which several different authority figures articulately advocate for child sexual abuse (I almost stopped reading at this point). And these things are filtered through the perspective of a main character who's basically a walking emotional open wound. It's almost dizzying in its intensity.

Maybe it will be easier to describe if I draw a comparison. Cormac McCarthy's The Road is a very comparable book in terms of postapocalyptic bleakness, even though it's stocked in a totally different section of the bookstore. The author does not tell us what we're supposed to be feeling, and most of the time, the characters don't even tell us what they're feeling. It's show-not-tell, which is the most basic and primal way (though not the only one) to create an awesome story. However, the moral compass of the book is still very strong, and we, the readers, always know where we stand, what we should think, who we should judge. The boy says "we're carrying the light". This brief piece of dialogue, repeated just a few times, orients us symbolically and morally. I don't want to give away the ending, so I'll just say that by a certain point, I think it's obvious to the reader that no matter whether the boy lives or dies, he'll have won, because he represents everything that's good in humanity.

We don't get that kind of moral compass in the Chtorr books.

There are a lot of things in these books that struck me as racist, sexist, even homophobic, and hateful towards disabled people, but I'm not sure how much of that is because it's filtered through the experience of an unreliable narrator. There's little to no authorial guidance. I don't think Gerrold pulls this off successfully all the time. For example, halfway through the series he decides to make Jim McCarthy multiracial, though it seems to have almost no connection to the plot other than an excuse to use certain racial slurs. At many points, it's hard to tell whether the really objectionable stuff is there as an oversight, or if it's there on purpose, in order to bring out some kind of intense but unpleasant reaction.

Here's a fairly successful example from the second book. Jim McCarthy is taking a break between assignments. A beautiful "Chinese" woman stares at him in a restaurant and comes to sit next to him. He says something to effect of "wow, I thought all Chinese women were kind of submissive and shy -- I guess you're not!" At this point, as the reader, I'm getting angry. Stupid yellow fever... blech.

The woman reveals that she's actually hosting the downloaded consciousness of McCarthy's ex-boyfriend, Ted.

They go off to her apartment. Ted explains that in his telepathic group (it's digitally-based telepathy, not the paranormal kind) he's part of a "pool" that takes over bodies to run important assignments. He loves being in the pool, describes the process of moving from body to body, and says has no attachment left to his original body. Presumably, someone else is using it, but he doesn't care who.

Jim McCarthy then has mind-blowing sex with Ted in the body of the "Oriental Goddess". But when he wakes up, Ted is gone, and the Asian woman, who looks "mean" now, not beautiful, tells him to get out so she can take a shower, because she feels dirty. Jim asks her why she's mad, since according to Ted, she's a telepath who's transcended identity and attachment to the physical body. She says, "that's what some of you boys like to think... just get out."

I think this episode really reinforced the problematic nature of relying on Jim's experience in order to make sense of the post-Chtorr-infested world.

The really weird part is that the est-related didacticism of the books inspired this kind of experiential writing, but it also works directly against it. When Gerrold gets excited about making some point about human psychology and "commitment" and "responsibility" and "accountability", his ability to write dialogue completely flies out the window. Every lecture given by every person in the books (and there are many lectures) is given in the exact same voice as every other lecture. All of a sudden you're removed from an emotion-soaked experience into an auditorium where someone is dryly barking some psychobabble about your mental processes. It's maddening.

At this point, I should probably note that the fifth book in the series should have been published 20 years ago. Gerrold is still trying to finish it up. If you go to Amazon reviews for any of the Chtorr books, half the entries are something like "I HATE YOUR GUTS, GERROLD YOU &$#@! THERE IS A SPECIAL PLACE IN HELL WAITING FOR YOU, FINISH THE NEXT BOOK OR I WILL HUNT YOU DOWN AND FEED YOU TO THE WORMS!!!". I was rather taken aback. I mean, I'd like to see a fifth book too, but I'm not personally angry at Gerrold. He says he's been very busy being a dad and getting through his son's rough adolescence, and as someone who is in a similar situation, I sympathize 100%.

To sum it up, reading the War Against the Chtorr series is like zooming down a highway at full speed, adrenaline pumping, driving a fast, powerful, complicated race car. But the car has a major steering problem and you constantly have to jerk the wheel to stay on the road. Then at random intervals, a policeman pulls you over, waves a gun in your face and gives you a lecture about accountability, then lets you back on the highway. And you know in advance that the highway ends in a pile of dirt with an "UNDER CONSTRUCTION" sign sticking out of it.

Richard K. Morgan: The Steel Remains

To break my string of "complaining about relatives" posts, I'll go ahead and talk about my impressions of the latest Richard K. Morgan book. I've read everything he's written. I like him a lot, and my dad is also a fan.

What's good about Richard K. Morgan? He's sort of a Marxist, and like China Mieville, the economic and political environment is not just window-dressing... it's absolutely essential to the plot. A lot of mainstream science fiction is set in extremely boring, poorly imagined worlds, and you can tell the author knows absolutely nothing about how economies really function, or else they're relying on a naive libertarian framework.

C.J. Cherryh is another writer I'm very fond of in this respect, although she's not particularly leftist. Her worlds are incredibly realistic and three-dimensional. You get the point of view from the starship captain, and also the point of view of the starship deck swabber third class whose main career goal is to move up to starship deck swabber second class.

Star Trek is an example of a poorly realized, not very complicated world. I really enjoyed the latest movie, but I enjoyed it for what it was... space opera. What does it mean to have an economy where you can create things with materializers and teleportation is commonplace? Who cares! The world in Star Trek is there so bold men in fast ships can zoom around and blow up stuff.

Richard K. Morgan's worlds are beautifully realized. I wouldn't want to live in them -- they're also brutal and dysfunctional. But they reflect/project our current global power system in very, very interesting ways.

He writes intricately-paced plots -- periods of long reflection punctuated by periods of intense action -- that contain generous servings of ultraviolence. His heroes are brooding, cynical, tormented. There's a lot of masculine cliches going on, but he also has enough sensitivity to have female characters criticize these cliches.

I didn't like his last book (Thirteen) all that much. It was based on some anthropological theories that I thought were kind of stupid. I did appreciate the ambition behind the book: it was set in a near future where a lot of modern-day conceptions of race and religion and sexuality were still strongly present and influenced the plot.

The Steel Remains is his first fantasy book. I'm almost done with it, and I've enjoyed it so far, although I don't think it's perfect.

Good stuff:

As usual for Morgan, the world is innovative. I cannot stand reheated Tolkien. It was good the first time around, but not the ten thousandth. Fantasy books with Tolkien-based geographical racism -- the dark swarthy evil lurking to the South and East of the map -- especially irritate me. The Steel Remains introduces two major civilizations and one collection of barbarian tribes, and they don't have instantly recognizable modern-day or Tolkien-based analogues. The civilization of the Empire is united by a religion that roughly resembles Islam, whereas the other one seems more like European-style feudalism under a polytheistic religion. There are some non-human races, a couple of which are vaguely elf-like (long-lived, magical, attractive). You can never escape elves!

Innovative characters. The main character is gay. Of the two secondary characters, one is a middle-aged barbarian guy and the other is a half-human, ebony-skinned woman who is probably a lesbian, and 200 years old. I'm especially impressed by the age of the woman. Commonly, men in fantasy novels can be hard-bitten and world-weary, but leading women don't get to that stage -- they're usually all fresh-faced and princessy. For a great reversal of the pattern, see C.J. Cherryh's Morgaine novels.

Economic themes. A major plot driver in the book is the recent legalization of debt slavery. This is not the same thing as the kind of slavery we had in America, but it's still incredibly brutal. Debt slavery had a huge impact on the culture and economy of the Roman Empire so there's a lot of little-known, interesting history for Morgan to draw from. The intersection of morality and economy is obviously going to be a major theme. It reminds me of Steven Saylor's historical detective fiction, the Gordianus the Finder series, before they deteriorated.

Not underestimating the intelligence and imagination of the reader. Most fantasy books are geared for a lazier reader than science fiction. They'll begin with a map, a list of characters and maybe even a glossary. In more serious science fiction, authors don't do this... they throw out the unfamiliar names and terms and let the reader put them together on their own. There are many exceptions, of course. For example, in one of the Titan-Wizard-Demon books, John Varley included a detailed glossary of neo-centaur reproduction that's just mind-boggling in its bizarreness, but a lot of fun to read. The glossary wasn't even all that necessary to the plot! I'm not totally against the relying-on-glossaries approach, but the way Morgan does it -- throwing out names and terms and religions and leaving it up to the reader to imagine the context -- results in a world that seems richer, if more confusing.

Bad Stuff:

The pacing seems a bit off. I'm 3/4 of the way through the book and things are just starting to heat up. The book has a non-standard structure: it's set nine years after a major battle that changed the world and affected all three characters. A lot of the setup involves reminiscence about the event. We're getting present-day exposition through flashbacks. However, the links between present day and past action are taking a long time to coalesce. This book is planned as part of a trilogy, so I guess I'll be doing a lot of waiting.

The sex. I hate Richard K. Morgan's sex scenes, and they're not any better in this fantasy book than they are in his science fiction. They're too long, and the body fluids are described in way too much detail. I'm more fond of the Tanith Lee approach to writing weird supernatural sex: focus on the atmosphere, include just one or two highly charged details. Morgan's sex scenes are just not sexy to me, in fact they make me want to put the book down and go wash my hands.

Cursing. I think he's relying on the word "f**k" a bit too much. I don't mind that it's there, I just would have liked to see a bit more variety.

I may update this post within a couple days, after I've had time to finish the book.

The Problem with Black-Themed Children's Books

I've discovered a serious problem as I'm searching to buy more. For the stage Sunny's at right now, they're either too negative or not exciting enough.

The ones about African-American history look exciting, but they bring up subjects I don't want to start discussing at this age. I'd rather wait at least a year or two.

The themes of the positive ones are... well... kind of crunchy, for lack of a better word. They would be great if he was already raised on that type of book and used to it. But he's not. He likes Dr. Seuss books, and then he likes things with trucks and spaceships and power rings and monsters and talking animals. It's difficult to get him to read anything else, and I certainly don't want to set up a dynamic where the only books he reads with black characters are the "boring" ones.

I've been doing internet searches and not coming up with a lot.

Here are three so far:
Bear on a Bike: this is below his level, but I think he'll really like the pictures.
I Need a Lunchbox: "A black girl is beginning first grade and getting all sorts of goodies, in particular a lunch box for which her little brother yearns with a single-minded passion. [...] At last, on his sister's first day of school, their father surprises the boy with a spaceship lunch box of his own." I think Sunny could really relate to the story.
Chinye: A West African Folk Tale: This story is very similar to Cinderella; it looks exciting and full of action.

What I'm really looking for is a rhyming picture book of a black truck driver with a talking animal sidekick whose truck can transform into a spaceship to fight monsters. As Sunny says, "that would be AWESOME good!"

Oe Victorious!

I have had a huge amount of respect for Mr. Oe ever since I read his masterpiece, "A Personal Matter". His body of work on modern Japanese identity is incredible and thought-provoking. He's an uncompromising gadfly and it's nice to see him come out on top.

Suit Against Writer in Japan Dismissed

By NORIMITSU ONISHI

Published: March 29, 2008

TOKYO — A Japanese court has rejected a defamation lawsuit against Kenzaburo Oe, the 1994 Nobel Prize Laureate for literature, agreeing with his assertion that the Japanese military was deeply involved in the mass suicides of civilians in Okinawa at the end of World War II.

In a closely watched ruling, the Osaka District Court threw out a $200,000 damage suit on Friday that was filed by a 91-year-old war veteran and another veteran’s surviving relatives, who said there was no evidence of the military’s involvement in the suicides. The plaintiffs had also sought to block further printing of Oe’s 1970 book of essays, “Okinawa Notes,” in which he wrote of how Japanese soldiers told Okinawans they would be raped, tortured and murdered by the advancing American troops and coerced them into killing themselves instead of surrendering.

“The military was deeply involved in the mass suicides,” Judge Toshimasa Fukami said in his ruling on Friday. Judge Fukami cited the testimony of survivors that soldiers handed out grenades to civilians to commit suicide with, and the fact that mass suicides occurred only in villages where Japanese troops were stationed.

The defamation lawsuit, filed in 2005, was seized upon by right-wing scholars and politicians in Japan who want to delete references to the military’s coercion of civilians in the mass suicides from the country’s high school history textbooks. Last April, during the administration of the former prime minister, Shinzo Abe, the Ministry of Education announced that references to the military’s role would be deleted from textbooks.

Some 110,000 people rallied in protest last September, in the biggest demonstration in the prefecture since the early 1970s. The protests, as well as Mr. Abe’s resignation and his replacement by Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda, a moderate, led the Ministry of Education to reinstate most of the references in December.

The about-face was an embarrassment for the Japanese government, which has always denied accusations by China and South Korea that it engaged in historical whitewashing, and has asserted that its school textbooks are free of political bias.

“The judge accurately read my writing,” Mr. Oe, 73, said at a news conference.

Doraemon

During the one year I spent living in Japan and going to Japanese kindergarten, I fondly remember reading Doraemon comic books/manga. Doraemon is a robot cat from the future who lives with a little boy named Nobita. Nobita happens to be a whiny loser with only occasional flashes of moral fiber and likeability. The diligent Doraemon, armed with futuristic gadgets, tries to help him improve his family and school life.

Although I could read very well in English by the age of 6, I couldn't read Japanese at all. So I would make my dad translate the comic books for me, panel by panel. If it was up to me, I'd have "read" Doraemon like this all day and night. My dad would always get tired after about 20 minutes, though. If he tried to just stop translating I'd command him to continue, so he'd rebel by inventing completely inappropriate translations. "In this panel, Doraemon says he wants to have sex with his sister", he would say. Then I would yell "No he didn't I know he didn't say that that's not what he really said stop doing that just tell me what he really said".

My favorite Doraemon plot that I still remember strongly is one I think of as "Nobita's Loser Ancestor". This is how it goes. In school everyone has to give a class presentation on their ancestors. Two of Nobita's classmates are mean kids who always bully him. I remember them as "Fat Boy" and "Snail" but looking them up on Wikipedia they are actually "Takeshi" and "Suneo". Takeshi's ancestor was a samurai, and so Takeshi gives a loud bragging presentation about how awesome his samurai ancestor was. Nobita goes home and asks Doraemon if his ancestor was also a samurai. Doraemon pulls out one of his time-travelling devices and shows Nobita the past. It turns out that Nobita's ancestor was a hunter. Apparently in feudal Japan hunters were absolutely the lowest of the low. Being a hunter was much, much worse than being a peasant farmer.

Seeing that his ancestor is also on the bottom rung of the social hierarchy depresses Nobita so much that Doraemon has to take pity on him. They travel back in time to see if they can do anything to change the situation. In fact, they find Nobita's ancestor being bullied by Takeshi's samurai ancestor and Suneo's samurai suck-up ancestor. Nobita has two more of Doraemon's high-tech gadgets: a cloak of invisiblity and a glove of power. He uses these devices to help his ancestor. Hijinks ensue, and the samurai bullies are defeated. Before Nobita and Doraemon go back to the future, they give Nobita's ancestor the cloak of invisibility and the glove of power. Nobita also gives him a quick history lesson which probably had something to do with the existence of unprecedented social mobility during certain points in the feudal era. Nobita's ancestor is supposed to take the cloak and glove, leave his forest, kick some samurai ass and turn himself into a lord with his own castle, ennobling his descendants and thereby giving Nobita something to brag about when he does his genealogical class presentation.

As always in Doraemon plots, Nobita's stupid idea backfires. When they check up on Nobita's ancestor using the peering-back-through-time gadget, he's using the cloak to sneak up on wild boar and the glove to bonk them on the head. "These magical devices have made me the greatest hunter of all time!" he brags, holding up and flourishing the wild boar's carcass.