A Matter for Men

"The War Against the Chtorr is perhaps best known to people who haven’t read it as a series that has gone unfinished longer than Game of Thrones . I think fans have been waiting 30-something years for the next book. David Gerrold has had an incredible career: among other things, he wrote probably the most beloved episode of the original Star Trek series. He worked on Star Trek: The Next Generation. He wrote a script that was going to tackle gay rights and AIDS , because he’d been promised as a gay man that Star Trek was going to tackle that. Unfortunately, at the time, some of the people involved were very against that, and they never made the episode. He’s a great writer. You can tell he’s a good writer because this book involves one of my least favourite things in classic science fiction : constant flashbacks to a high school civics class where an old man explains how the world works to a bunch of kids. And of course, the way the world works is: you can’t have feelings, you’ve got to be rational, you’ve got to have rights, you’ve got to be a self-reliant Robert Heinlein person. But The War Against the Chtorr is just smart and complicated enough to let you think, this isn’t necessarily true. It’s what one character believes, and tells the protagonist. But you don’t have to buy it. A lot of people in this book are full of shit. The plot of the book now seems somewhat more chilling than when it was written. About two-thirds of the human species dies in the span of a couple of years, of explosively infectious plagues. Humanity is just starting to get itself back together from this, when someone points out, ‘Hey, there’s weird stuff growing in certain places. There’s this red scum on the ocean.’ And I don’t think it’s a spoiler to tell the reader that there’s an alien ecology now growing on earth, and the first book, at least, doesn’t tell you where it came from or how it got here. This is an alien invasion from the bottom up, starting with soil bacteria and plankton in the ocean being replaced by a more competitive alien alternative. If you were to set about invading an alien planet, that is probably the most effective way to do it. It’s really not very cost-efficient for super advanced aliens to individually land and shoot us all with lasers, which is what they tend to do in alien invasion stories. War Against the Chtorr is an ecological invasion, kind of like Annihilation . But instead of being metaphysical, it’s just biological. These animals are just going to replace all of our animals, and we’re going to die unless we do something about it. The book is very clever and very careful about never giving you an alien commander to talk to or an alien language to translate. As humans, we want to think there’s something in charge that reads and writes and talks and has a plan. But of course, nature doesn’t work like that. The things we’re looking for up at the top of the pyramid depend on these things at the bottom, like soil bacteria. That said, the iconic part of the series is these enormous worms, which give the Chtorr their name, because that’s the noise they make when they’re upset. The worms do eat people, and gather people as livestock. It’s not clear they’re intelligent in any way, but they’re frightening, and our protagonist really hates them. I think one of the curious things about the book is that it offers you this serving of xenophobia, of fear of the other, which we all find very compelling: the monster that wants to kill us, and we want to burn it before that can happen. But again, like with its politics, the book is just challenging enough to make you say, ‘Is fear and burning really the right response here, or just the human one?’ Of all the books I’ve listed, it is probably the easiest read. That’s not a bad thing. And it’s very psychologically acute. It’s easy to think that a book written in the 70s or 80s is going to be somehow less clever or less human than the books we write today, but that’s just a whiggish approach to literature, where things steadily get better and better. David Gerrold, a gay man, is writing about queerness in addition to burning alien worms. Science fiction was obviously tackling those themes in the 70s and 80s, but maybe we have forgotten that. It’s a great adventure book, as well as asking some good questions about how we would behave if human society fell apart, and which values we actually care about – and which ones we only hold to because they make us feel nice. I want to feel nice. I really value some of the things this book questions, and I want to believe that they are vital to human survival. But the book says, ‘Do we really need this?’ Because the book is willing to challenge me on these things, and not just tell me, ‘Hey, you’re wrong, we should all become fascists and kill aliens,’ I get the sense that I’m playing with it. The book isn’t here to hit you on the head. It’s here to just poke you. I like that."