The Chaplain's War by Brad R. Torgerson

Published by Baen on October 7, 2014

"Humans are superior to all alien life forms because, gosh darn it, we're human" was a popular theme of 1950s science fiction. It has gradually given way to a more sophisticated view in modern sf (except for movies that imagine aliens as lizard invaders), but The Chaplain's War is a throwback to the days when a belief in human superiority was steadfast.

In the 22nd century, alien mantes (plural of mantis) rule Purgatory and have imprisoned the humans who tried to invade it. The invasion was retaliatory, following strikes against human worlds by the mantes, but was in retrospect unwise. The mantes feel a need to wipe out competitive life forms as they expand their colonization of habitable planets. Their new expansion will move through all planets colonized by humans until it reaches Earth. Sucks to be human!

But wait, since humans are superior (if technologically inferior), perhaps humanity can yet be saved. A mantis called "the professor" wants to learn about belief in God from a chaplain's assistant before the mantes wipe out the remaining human life on Purgatory, where they have imprisoned human POWs for no clear reason. The chaplain's assistant, Harrison Barlow, is nondenominational and not particularly religious, having been pressed into the role as a military assignment. At the request of the chaplain, who conveniently dies, Barlow builds a chapel on Purgatory but plays no secular role, other than explaining God to the alien professor.

There are some clever moments in The Chaplain's War. Most of them occur early in the novel. For example, some members of Barlow's congregation, believing in an angry, judgmental, Old Testament God, reason that the mantes are God's true children, dispatched on a holy mission to wipe out the sinful human race. That conclusion is not rooted in logic, given that the mantes do not accept the existence of God, but logic rarely informs religious belief.

Much less interesting are the obligatory scenes of recruitment and training that are standard fare in military sf, presented here in unnecessary flashbacks that add needless length to the novel. The flashbacks only become interesting when Barlow is trained to be a chaplain's assistant in a war zone. That, at least, is fresh.

The flashbacks eventually catch up to the present, in which the chaplain's assistant is taking a nonviolent, peacemaking approach to the war by trying to persuade the mantes of human worth. Every now and then he points out how humans are, in fact, superior to mantes. "We're better than you so you should see things our way" is not one of the better negotiating tools in the diplomat's briefcase but perhaps the mantes will agree with Barrow and stop slaughtering humans. You'll need to read the novel to find out.

The novel preaches the need to respect people's right to hold religious beliefs that are not our own, a position with which I firmly agree even if the novel's message is delivered without subtlety. More subtle is a pro-Christian, anti-Muslim bias which, fortunately, makes only a rare appearance. I was less enthralled with the assistant's sense of morality ("no, I will not have sex with the hot naked woman who just crawled into my sleeping bag because we are not in love") which seems like another throwback to the 1950s.

Cheesy sentences like "I flattened to the deck as weapons belched instant death over my head" will win no literary awards but, for the most part, the quality of Brad Torgersen's writing is reasonable. While The Chaplain's War gives a new twist to an old story, too much of the novel is an unimaginative regurgitation of stale scenes from countless military sf novels. This might have worked better as a short story or as a tight short novel.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS

Ship of Fools by Katherine Anne Porter

First published in 1962; published digitally by Open Road Media on April 28, 2015

Labor unrest or a nascent revolution has gripped Veracruz. To avoid it, as well as a smallpox epidemic and approaching hurricanes, foreign travelers scramble to board a German ship that is docked in the Veracruz port. The passengers are a mix of Germans and non-Germans. The voyage takes place in the early 1930s.

Ship of Fools is aptly named. Taking a trip with nearly any of the passengers would be a voyage to Hell. They each hold the belief that their language and place of birth make them superior to people born in other countries. Apart from their nationalism, they carry an assortment of religious and racial prejudices. They moralize and condemn. They gossip endlessly. They argue (or bicker) about love and politics and religion. They are easily offended by opinions they do not share. They are hypocrites and betrayers. The men are misogynistic and most of the women are self-indulgent schemers. The ship is a microcosm of humanity with nearly all the good people omitted.

Christian passengers hate the lone Jewish passenger as well as the man who is traveling to Germany to rescue his Jewish wife. The Jewish passenger despises the fact that a Jewish woman would marry outside her faith. Non-Catholics hate Catholics. Germans hate Spaniards. The old despise the young. Women look down upon other women, particularly the Spanish countess who has been exiled from Cuba and given passage as a prisoner (much to the delight of the captain and a doctor who attends to her ether addiction). Revolutionary students and Spanish dancers stuck in steerage seem to be the only passengers who are capable of having a good time, probably because they do not spend their time judging others or worrying about how others are judging them.

Nothing in the novel approaches a plot but the character studies are flawless. Petty characters bicker about the people with whom they must share quarters and dinner tables. They form alliances and enemies. All of this is entertaining and, thanks to Katherine Anne Porter's elegant prose, easy to read. In the end, however, it becomes wearing to take such a long journey with so many fools. No particular character carries the novel. No major character is given more prominence than any other. A young American (Jenny) and her unmarried partner (David) are the least offensive characters and, for a time, it seems that their disintegrating relationship will give the novel some focus, but their story is buried amidst all the others. The development of so many characters is masterful but it leaves the story without a center.

A few of the characters change or grow during the course of the novel although most are just as foolish at the end as they were at the start. That is a reflection of reality -- one ship's voyage is unlikely to undo the prejudices that have built over a lifetime -- but that reality gives the novel a static feel. Perhaps Ship of Fools is just too long and too detailed to achieve the simple beauty and power of Porter's shorter works. It is nevertheless full of small moments that make the journey worth taking.

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Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights by Salman Rushdie

Published by Random House on September 8, 2015

Two years, eight months and 28 nights is one thousand nights and one night. Blending magic and myth, science fiction and fantasy, superhero comic books and classic literature, Salman Rushdie tells us the story of the Two Worlds' War from the perspective of a narrator who lives in a better time, about a thousand and one years from now. The story begins, however, in the distant past.

Dunia, also known as the Lightning Princess, is a jinni. In the twelfth century, Dunia took a human lover named Ibn Rushd, a philosopher-writer-storyteller. She has a thing for philosophers, having also known Aristotle and Plato, but she fell in love with Rushd.

As a philosopher, Rushd is not entirely successful. He considers himself defeated by the philosopher Ghazili, who died before Rushd was born. Ghazili jeered at philosophy because, to his mind, logic and reason have no role in a Universe that is ruled by God's will. Rushd believes in logic and science and even in God but not in religion because "the godly are God's worst advocates." Challenging accepted interpretations of the Qu'ran has caused some trouble for Rushd (including book-burnings and exile) until a Caliph deems him "rehabilitated." Salman Rushdie is plainly having some fun using Rushd as his alter-ego. Rushdie's concerns with religious intolerance (as well as other forms of intolerance) resurface frequently in the story.

Rushd is not good to Dunia or his family. The bastard children he ignores eventually have progeny who disperse to all corners of the globe, including North America, where the story resumes 800 years later. The story sometimes circles back to Rushd who, experiencing a post-death epiphany, enlists Dunia's help to "reunite their scattered family and help it right the coming world cataclysm." It is that quest that animates the book's plot. Dunia's task includes avenging treachery by dark princes of the jinn while fending off a jinn invasion (easier than it sounds, since many jinn are too lazy or horny to bother making the journey through the wormhole).

Dunia's descendants are mostly notable for the absence of earlobes until Dunia awakens their powers. Key characters include Geronimo Manezes (a gardener who is afflicted with a worsening case of levitation, a condition he equates with "a previously unknown virus: a gravity bug"); a baby who exposes corrupt politicians; Teresa Saca, a young woman who electrocutes men with lighting from her fingertips; and Jinendra "Jimmy" Kapoor, a young artist who seems to bring his Indian superhero to life before learning that a "dark jinni" has been unleashed on the world.

The stories that Scheherazade told taught lessons. I'm not sure that Rushdie's updated version teaches lessons so much as it satirizes the lessons that others teach. Rushdie lampoons philosophy and its "more tedious cousin" theology, particularly the notions that "only fear will move sinful Man towards God" and the countervailing view that "with the passage of time human beings will turn from faith to reason, in spite of all the inadequacies of the rational mind." Perhaps one lesson to take from the novel is Rushdie's observation that modern life moves so quickly that we have forgotten the pleasure of lingering (and no longer have the attention spans that slowly unfolding pleasures command). Another might lie in a character's realization that the illusion of reality is preferable to a known fantasy. And another is that using fear (of government or God) to control behavior is bound to lead to oppression. And another: "rage destroys the enraged." Of course, the virtue of tolerance and of preserving free thought by separating church and state is always a good lesson.

If the lessons are a bit heavy-handed, if some of Rusdie's targets are easy, that seems a natural product of satire. While satire is fun, it also makes the story seem less substantial. My only other quarrel with Two Years is that some moments in the story are a bit too silly, but those moments are few.

Well into the novel, a character from the future explains that "to tell a story about the past is to tell a story about the present" and "to recount a fantasy" is to recount "a tale about the actual." Stories from the past, including myths, help us explore how we got there from here. I'm not sure Rushdie's novel accomplishes those goals, but the story is entertaining and, not surprisingly, it is enlivened by Rushdie's rich prose.

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Shetani's Sister by Iceberg Slim

Published by Vintage/Black Lizard on August 4, 2015

Shetani's Sister is the creation of Iceberg Slim (the street name of Robert Beck). According to Justin Gifford's introduction, Iceberg Slim spent much of his life as a pimp. His autobiography and crime stories were culturally influential in a way that mirrors gangster rap in the evocation of life on the street. In fact, Gifford credits Iceberg Slim for influencing early rappers, including Snoop Dogg, whose voice I kept hearing in my head as I read the novel. Previously unpublished, Shetani's Sister is Iceberg Slim's final novel.

Shetani's Sister tells a story of pimps, whores, and crooked cops. The primary character, a New York pimp named Shetani (whose name means Satan in Swahili), doles out heroin and cocaine to assure that his whores continue to worship him. Shetani is a Master Pimp and the police are no match for him. Yet Iceberg Slim's portrayal of police officers, while not ignoring LAPD's tendency toward brutality, is surprisingly sympathetic.

Shetani sends his bottom girl, Petra, to LA to expand his empire of whores. There she meets Jerry Crane, a vice cop with a coke habit who helps her avoid arrest in exchange for a regular supply of coke, sex, and cash. Crane finds himself with a problem (one of many) when his honest partner, Russell Rucker, begins to suspect that Crane has traveled to the dark side.

Shetani's Sister tells a compelling story despite its shortcomings. The novel has moments that are too melodramatic. The prose is unpolished and occasionally clichéd (although less clichéd than the prose of some established authors I've encountered). Iceberg Slim's similes sometimes stretch too far over-the-top in an effort to be luridly descriptive, but the same could be said of Mickey Spillane, whose writing I enjoy as a product of its time. The treatment of women is also the product of a time and subculture, although the tone is much more respectful when it addresses older women and faithful wives.

The story's glorification of Shetani (presumably as a stand-in for the author) is laughable, but I had the same reaction to Lou Dobbs' novel that glorifies an obvious stand-in for Lou Dobbs. A key difference between the two novels is that Iceberg Slim's struck me as honest. Shetani doesn't hide his flaws. He makes mistakes and he isn't afraid to admit them. In fact, being the baddest pimp on the planet clearly has an adverse impact on Shetani's mental health (or maybe it's the constant drug use).

At one point, a vice detective comforts another character by saying "nobody bucks fate." At a funeral, the same detective says "don't judge him harshly, for a victim lies within us all." Those may be the points Iceberg Slim intended to make in this novel. The pimps, the whores, the drug addicts, the crooked cops ... all suffered personal tragedies that played a role in shaping their lives. Yes, they made choices, and yes, they told themselves a lot of lies to justify their actions, but fate might still be the best explanation for their tragic lives. In any event, Iceberg Slim's exploration of that topic -- the thin and oft-crossed line between good and evil -- demonstrates more insight than many crime writers who wield more sophisticated prose are able to manage.

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Ultima by Stephen Baxter

First published in Great Britain in 2014; published by Roc on August 4, 2015

Ultima sounds like a sports drink but it is actually the sequel to Stephen Baxter's Proxima. You should read Proxima before reading Ultima if you want to understand all of the novel's references to past events, but enough of those are summarized that Ultima can be read as a stand-alone novel.

Ultima is a novel of big ideas -- or, more precisely, it is an exploration of one big idea. It won't appeal to science fiction fans who think that sf should always include Wookiees or Vulcans. It won't appeal to fans who crave action. It might not appeal to sf fans who think that an "idea" novel should consist of ideas piled on top of ideas (the kind of novel that usually treats plot and characterization as unimportant).

I give Baxter credit for creating the Dreamers, a Machiavellian alien race that differs from other science fiction aliens in imaginative ways. Saying more about them would spoil the fun. I will say, however, that while the enigmatic Dreamers are at the novel's core, the novel focuses upon the consequences of the Dreamers' actions rather than the Dreamers themselves.

Proxima introduced an old idea, portals (or "hatches" in this incarnation) that take people to different places in the universe, or different universes, or different times. Hatches are coupled with transitional events that change the nature of the universes that key characters inhabit. In one alternate history/universe/timeline, there are three space-faring Terran powers: the Romans, the Xin (Chinese), and the Brikanti (Brits allied with Scandinavians). The civilizations have mastered a crude form of interstellar travel (combining power sources known as kernels left by the Hatch builders with "point and shoot" navigation) despite their failure to develop computers.

War is brewing and one of the ships has undertaken the mission of saving Earthshine, an AI that serves as a repository of information designed to allow human civilization to survive, or to rebuild it if necessary. Earthshine has its own agenda. It is, in its own way, as Machiavellian as the Dreamers. Earthshine "hatches" a plan of itsown that bears fruit in another universe/alternate history, one in which Incas dominate. That plan puts Earthshine, another AI, and several human characters in a position to understand what the Dreamers have been up to and what purpose all the Hatches serve. It is, as I said, a pretty cool idea.

The rest of the story fills up space with (alternate) historical and political developments and character building. I didn't think any of that was bad or boring (although that might be the reaction of readers who lack interest in history and politics), but I did think those parts of the book could have been profitably shortened. To the extent that Ultima is read as a mystery novel -- with Earthshine serving as the detective who unravels the mystery of the Dreamers -- everything else comes across as padding that keeps the story from delivering the suspense that a mystery should have. On the other hand, I liked the characters and I enjoyed Baxter's speculation about what alternative histories might be like, so I had no difficulty hanging in until the end. Readers who suffer from ADD or wookiee-mania might have a different experience.

The best part of this novel of the future takes place in the far far far distant future. It is wonderfully descriptive and even a little enthralling. Even if it takes quite a long time for the reader to get there, the destination is worth the effort of the journey.

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