Dan Abnett - Embedded (2011)

"They'll blame this on minerals. Well, great. It isn't the fucking ground's fault, right? It's probably some giant domino effect. Some asshole somewhere said the wrong thing to another asshole at some fucking summit, and then some other asshole didn't get his preferential deal, and so he cut the profits on yet another asshole's contract and then... and then... and then... and it's a giant rolling ball of shit coming downhill and sweeping everything up. And that giant rolling ball of shit's called history, Bloom, and we were standing in its fucking way."

Greyscale AND CGI on the same cover? You spoil us, Angry Robot

'Embedded' by Dan Abnett is a stodgily written military SF story that nevertheless includes some competently written action sequences. Its central conceit, about a journalist embedding his consciousness into a soldier so that he can get the inside scoop on a military cover-up operation, is intriguing and plausibly played out, and at times the novel flirts with some interesting ideas, which it never really makes the most of. The end result is uninspiring.
   One of the problems with the book is our protagonist, Lex Falk, an obnoxious journalist who is ready to sleepwalk his way through another assignment until he's denied access by the military, at which point he decides it's personal. The idea of a journalist not being this idealistic seeker of the truth is healthily cynical, and to be fair to Abnett Falk does undergo some character development along the way, ending up willing to risk his life to get the truth out because the people deserve to hear it. But unfortunately Falk's characterisation is just so annoying it's hard to enjoy spending time in the man's head. One doesn't need to sympathise, share the views of or indeed like a protagonist for a novel to work, and one of the benefits of fiction is that it asks us to empathise with those we might otherwise not, but for this to work the character does need to be compelling. Falk, with his sense of entitlement, his sleaziness and his casual misogyny, is simply unpleasant.
   Another problem with the book is the writing. Abnett's prose is clunky at best, and he is fond of cutesy neologisms, such as "presearch", or "wealthy" as a term meaning 'well', that are not nearly as clever as he thinks they are. The worst offender is "freeking®", the sponsored swearing that some of the characters have inserted into their speech. The idea of sponsored swearing is marginally witty, though the first time I saw it in writing I wanted to hurl the book across the room, and combined with 'wealthy', and the fact that the book sets up Space Communists as the bad guys, I was kind of hoping there would be some kind of satirical pay-off to having these in the obviously American soldiers' lexicon, as a way of telling us something about two contrasting cultures. However this never happens, these words are just there, glaring, gimmicky and serving no narrative purpose whatsoever.
   Having said that, once Falk is implanted into the soldier Neil Bloom's head, the book finds its footing a bit more and the plot finally kicks into gear. It's just a shame it takes almost a hundred pages before this happens. Bloom gets shot in the head, removing his conscious control and leaving Falk in charge of his body. There's an actually pretty great scene in which Falk slowly comes back to consciousness in Bloom's mutilated body and staggers up like a zombie. Through the rest of the book, Falk has to rely on Bloom's training to get him through the day. This is the real meat of the book, that soldiers train so hard so that they can internalise these actions so when they're dropped into combat situations, the autonomic reflexes take over, and they can trust these reflexes and their training to help them survive.
   What follows is by far the most successful part of the book, as Falk, in charge of Bloom's body, and the remaining soldiers in his platoon, must work together to survive. There is a tightly written, engaging action sequence in which one of the soldiers panics, leading to the death of many of the others. In this part of the book, Abnett at times approaches the gritty, from the ground view, as well as the violence and meaningless death, the horror, sadness and frustration at it all that we encounter in a truly great piece of war fiction like, say, The Forever War. However, as well as being a lesser writer, Abnett also lacks Haldeman's unwavering focus and purpose in writing about war. This comes across in Abnett's tone; he is never able to achieve the sincerity of Haldeman's writing. It also manifests in how easily Abnett lets his characters off the hook. Multiple soldiers all swear that they're going to kill the soldier who made the mistake, and many of them are gearing up to, but his reckless actions kill him before Abnett's characters are forced to make that moral choice. Similarly, at the end, Falk is only able to talk his way out of the situation due to a coincidence that stretches suspension of disbelief, though to be fair to Abnett I think having the military kill everyone before they could spill the secret would have perhaps been too cynical a move. 'Embedded' also spreads its philosophy pretty thinly on the ground, although the discussion quoted above, in which the soldiers make the point that war is frequently fought for the petty reasons of the rich and powerful, while the soldiers do all the dirty work, is well taken.
   'Embedded' is a mess and something of a missed opportunity, but for all its faults it does show the occasional flash of brilliance.  Unfortunately the one-note characters and poor quality of the prose drag it down, but these are things that can be fixed when a writer develops. In particular if Abnett had found something more concrete to hang that middle section of his novel on, 'Embedded' might have turned into something special.

Joe Haldeman – The Forever War (1974)

“Relativity propped it up, at least gave it the illusion of being there... the way all reality becomes illusory and observer-oriented when you study general relativity. Or Buddhism. Or get drafted.”

‘The Forever War’ is at heart a war novel. Joe Haldeman had served in Vietnam and his experiences inform the book. The concept is pure hard SF worthy of Robert Heinlein or Larry Niven. Soldiers are conscripted to fight in an interstellar war. Because of relativity a few years passing for the soldiers means many decades passing back on earth, they return home to a world hopelessly alien to them that has forgotten all about them. The soldiers finding themselves lost and out of touch in a world that has drastically moved on without them is a powerful metaphor for the reception the soldiers returning home from Vietnam received in reality. The main weapon that the soldiers use to fight the hive-mind aliens is even powered armour, same as in Heinlein’s ‘Starship Troopers’. But the two books could not be further apart. ‘The Forever War’ is about the horror and futility of war, and the senseless waste of lives lost and displaced that follow.

   The protagonist is William Mandella, one of a hundred strong and healthy young people with IQs above 150 called up to fight against a terrifying unknown alien threat that has been destroying Earth spaceships. From the beginning, Mandella is cynical about the army. He studied physics and was looking to go into teaching and has no desire to be in the army or fight in a war. Unlike the protagonist of ‘Starship Troopers’, who learns that the army is always right, Mandella’s experience is one of horror, pain and grief. There is an argument that any anti-war story has the problem that it is inherently glamourising war by turning it into entertainment, no matter what the ultimate message. ‘The Forever War’ uses this to its advantage by initially appearing to be a fun, Heinlein-esque space adventure yarn, in much the same way that William Goldings’ ‘Lord Of The Flies’ initially appears to be a Ballentyne-esque boys’ adventure before things start to go wrong. Mandella, with his high IQ, his easygoing competence and his laidback, wry tone, could easily be a Heinlein protagonist.

   The recruits start off their training on the moon, and then on the planet Charon, more than twice the distance from the sun as Pluto, to prepare them for the conditions of war in space. It doesn’t take long for things to start going wrong in these harsh conditions. The soldiers are warned that the slightest mistake in space can lead to their deaths, and many of them die messy, unglamourous deaths in training. Much of the novel’s power comes from the way Haldeman describes these deaths. The tone is achingly sad but never over the top, calm and without embellishment as Mandella describes truly horrific death. It effectively conveys the feeling of loss over this senseless waste of human life.

   Soon enough Mandella and the others are shipped off to the first confrontation with the Taurans, engaging in a series of bloody battles that most of them don’t survive. Mandella doesn’t relish killing other sentient beings, and survives more through luck rather than battle prowess, and the one battle that he does actually lead goes pretty poorly. Haldeman does a really good job of conveying the idea that war is not full of glorious victories and excitement, but long stretches of routine interrupted by moments of terror and violence. It’s another reason why ‘The Forever War’ is so crucial; it’s just about the only military SF book that’s not violently militaristic. The book is also sensibly cynical about both the military and the government. The army is not above implanting subconscious conditioning in the soldiers’ heads to make them better killers, without telling them. At the end it turns out that the Taurans had never known war until encountering humanity, and that the war had been started and prolonged by humans because the Earth economy needed a war to fuel it.

   On top of all this, ‘The Forever War’ is a deeply affecting love story. Mandella’s relationship with Marygay Potter, another soldier in his original company and the only one to survive as long as he does, is perfectly natural and believable. Throughout the novel they become more and more important to each other as they end up being their only remaining connection to the world they grew up in. I will admit to getting a bit emotional at the bits where he discovers her grievously injured in the acceleration shell, when they are separated again the final time they are ordered back into duty, and again at the end when he discovers that she has been waiting for him to return all this time.

   The message of ‘The Forever War’ about the human cost of war is always relevant, and it’s all the more important in a genre that frequently celebrates and glorifies violence. At a time when an adaptation of ‘Ender’s Game’ by Orson Scott Card is hitting the theatres, (a book that is well written but problematic before you even get to Card’s deeply unpleasant personal opinions), it’s clear that militaristic tendencies are still alive and well in the genre, and Haldeman’s deconstruction of those ideas remain just as powerful and moving as it must have been when it was first published.