{"id":6034,"date":"2014-07-07T09:36:46","date_gmt":"2014-07-07T13:36:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=6034"},"modified":"2014-07-11T05:38:25","modified_gmt":"2014-07-11T09:38:25","slug":"review-the-chaplains-war","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=6034","title":{"rendered":"Review: The Chaplain&#8217;s War"},"content":{"rendered":"<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>\n<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>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<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>\n<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>\n<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>\n<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>\n<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>\n<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>\n<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>\n<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>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>As I write, the author of The Chaplain&#8217;s War (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&hellip; <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=6034\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Review: The Chaplain&#8217;s War<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[44,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6034","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-review","category-science-fiction","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6034","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6034"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6034\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6037,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6034\/revisions\/6037"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6034"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6034"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6034"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}