Review: The Chaplain&#8217;s War
<p>As I write, the author of <cite>The Chaplain&#8217;s War</cite> (Brad Torgerson; Baen) has recently been one of the subjects of a three-minute hate by left-wingers in the SF community, following Larry Correia&#8217;s organization of a drive to get Torgerson and other politically incorrect writers on the Hugo ballot. This rather predisposed me to like his work sight unseen; I&#8217;m not a conservative myself, but I dislike the PC brigade enough to be kindly disposed to anyone who gives them apoplectic fits.</p>
<p>Alas, there&#8217;s not much value here.  Much of it reads like a second-rate imitation of <cite>Starship Troopers</cite>, complete with lovingly detailed military-training scenes and hostile bugs as opponents.  And the ersatz Heinlein is the <em>good</em> parts &#8211; the rest is poor worldbuilding, even when it&#8217;s not infected by religious sentiments I consider outright toxic.</p>
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<p>Harrison Barlow is a chaplain&#8217;s assistant in an Earth military that is losing a war with mantis-like aliens bent on wiping out humanity.  He and a remnant of the fleet are penned up on a Mantis-held planet, and the force-field walls are literally closing in. Then, the reason they were not instantly wiped out after losing their battle is revealed when Barlow is questioned by a Mantis anthropologist he comes to think of as the Professor.</p>
<p>The Mantes do not understand human religion.  They have previously wiped out two other sophont species who engaged in religious practices.  The Professor is of a faction among them now thinks this was over-hasty and that some effort should be made to understand &#8220;faith&#8221; before humanity is extinguished.</p>
<p>In the novel&#8217;s first major event, Barlow &#8211; with nothing to lose but his life &#8211; refuses to answer the Professor&#8217;s questions except on the condition that the Mantes call a truce.  Much to his own astonishment, this actually happens; Barlow is repatriated and celebrated as humanity&#8217;s only successful negotiator with the Mantes.</p>
<p>The rest of the novel cross-cuts between (on the one hand) flashbacks to Barlow&#8217;s boot-camp experiences and the events leading up to his crucial meeting with the Professor, and (on the other) the events which follow on a Mantis decision to break the truce while Barlow and his superiors are negotiating with the Queen Mother who initiated the war.</p>
<p>What follows is deeply flawed as SF even if you&#8217;re not put off by Torgerson&#8217;s religious evangelism. The Mantes are too obviously authorial sock puppets; they (and the Queen Mother in particular) swing too readily and rapidly from being profoundly alien to seeming excessively human-like in psychology considering the given details of their biology and society.</p>
<p>By the time the Queen Mother begins having pangs of conscience over her previous behavior, believability has already essentially collapsed. The Mantes have become humans in funny-hat carapaces. Lost is any of the illusion, so necessary in fiction but especially in SF, that the author&#8217;s characters and his setting have any causal autonomy.</p>
<p>The ensuing redemption narrative is so obviously manipulative that it&#8217;s wince-inducing. It gets worse as it goes on, and the ending is positively mawkish.  Even a religious person should squirm when an apologia is this clumsy.</p>
<p>Then we get to the essential anti-rationality of the author&#8217;s religion.  There are several crucial beats in the plot at which the day is saved by what the author none-too-subtly hints is divine intervention; I think this is a direct crime against science fiction&#8217;s core promise that the universe is rationally knowable.  But this book is a tepid mess even if you don&#8217;t see that as a problem.</p>
