Wergen: The Alien Love War

"This is formed from short stories. There’s a term for this which science fiction criticism invented and has argued over ever since, the ‘fix-up.’ Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles is a good example—that’s a series of short stories set on Mars, mostly, which reads as if it’s a novel. But in fact, some editions of it have different stories. They tend to be episodic and can cover a long period of time. The Wergen are an alien race who are sexually attracted to human beings, whether they like it or not, and want to help them. Humans are more than happy to exploit this, and some of the Wergen resist or fight back. They don’t want to be subject to desires they can’t control. It’s an extraordinary achievement—Wergen biology is fascinating, and it really plays with our notions of gendered desire. Of course, same sex and opposite sex is rather different when applied to cross-species relationships. It’s deeply moving at times. There are lots of tragic moments. That term is also argued about! It tends to refer to science fiction that is very dependent on scientific extrapolation— physics , chemistry, astronomy, the hard sciences—in fact, the sort of fiction that Clarke tended to write. In later novels, he had the habit of stopping the narrative to spend a chapter discussing a random moon of Jupiter or wherever, presumably jumping off from the latest academic scientific article. It tends to be used as the opposite of ‘soft’ science fiction, which extrapolates from sociology, psychology and other soft sciences. There’s a chapter in Alien Love War where a group of characters are descending in freefall from a great height and hoping to survive. In hard science fiction, the author will have worked out the mass of the planet below and the gravitational pull, when maximum velocity would be reached, and so forth. In soft science fiction you’d get an allusion to Icarus or Lucifer, as you try not to worry that that character won’t walk again. I’m not sure I would have thought of this novel as hard science fiction myself, as there’s so much psychology. Maybe Rivera did crunch the numbers."