13 lines
3.8 KiB
Plaintext
13 lines
3.8 KiB
Plaintext
Review: The Chaplain’s War
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<p>As I write, the author of <cite>The Chaplain’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’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’m not a conservative myself, but I dislike the PC brigade enough to be kindly disposed to anyone who gives them apoplectic fits.</p>
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<p>Alas, there’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 – the rest is poor worldbuilding, even when it’s not infected by religious sentiments I consider outright toxic.</p>
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<p><span id="more-6034"></span></p>
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<p>Harrison Barlow is a chaplain’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>
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<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 “faith” before humanity is extinguished.</p>
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<p>In the novel’s first major event, Barlow – with nothing to lose but his life – refuses to answer the Professor’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’s only successful negotiator with the Mantes.</p>
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<p>The rest of the novel cross-cuts between (on the one hand) flashbacks to Barlow’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>
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<p>What follows is deeply flawed as SF even if you’re not put off by Torgerson’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>
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<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’s characters and his setting have any causal autonomy.</p>
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<p>The ensuing redemption narrative is so obviously manipulative that it’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>
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<p>Then we get to the essential anti-rationality of the author’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’s core promise that the universe is rationally knowable. But this book is a tepid mess even if you don’t see that as a problem.</p>
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