Subject: Re: "A Matter For Men (The War Against the Chtorr, Book 1)" by David Gerrold
On 2025-11-07, Lynn McGuire <
lynnmcguire5@gmail.com> wrote:
"A Matter For Men (The War Against the Chtorr, Book 1)" by David Gerrold
This is very hard sci-fi.
It's the ultimate invasive species tale. I think biologists reading
the book, or the series, will have many questions... and will be
annoyed that the characters aren't asking those questions. In part
the book shows its age--it's originally from 1983--when there wasn't
ubiquitous DNA sequencing yet.
For instance, the origin of the Chtorran lifeforms is a total
mystery. We don't know how they get seeded on Earth, nor where
they are ultimately from. They have sufficiently compatible
biochemistry that we can eat each other. And they seem oddly
pre-adapted to Earth's environment, although survivor bias comes
into play here, i.e., we may only see the subset of Chtorran species
that manage to flourish. Some readers have speculated--maybe this
is even mentioned in the books, I don't remember--that the Chtorrans
aren't extraterrestrial in origin but from Earth's future. That's
the sort of thing that should be "easy" to figure out: Are the
Chtorrans related to Earth's tree of life?
Do not pick up this book without having many
hours available to you to finish it. Once started, the book sucks you
in gradually so that you say, "just one more chapter".
Movie directors get praised for directing action scenes, but nobody
credits writers for writing action. It's just a few pages, but
that fight where Jim takes on the escaping worm is _intense_.
The book starts off with a series of plagues that devastate the human population across the Earth. Then the weird plants start growing everywhere. Then the huge one meter to five meter long alien
carnivorous worms show up and starting eating people, cows, horses, etc.
The worms are very difficult to destroy without a combat rated flamethrower.
No, the books starts off around the time the worms are showing up.
The plagues and stuff are backstory that we learn eventually. Also,
the United States humiliatingly lost a war in Afghanistan.
The protagonist is a biology student, IIRC, who is drafted into the
army, manages to survive his first encounter with a worm, and becomes proficient at killing them. Humans are very good at exterminating
apex predators, of course, and the worms would merely be a nuisance
in the big picture. It's that Earth's ecosystems are eaten from
the bottom up.
Gerrold has claimed many times over the years that there will be a fifth book and a sixth book and a seventh book. I will believe it when I see
it.
The series was initially billed as a trilogy, but the third volume
never appeared. Then Gerrold published a revised version of the
first two volumes and promised there would be five in total. After
four books, he changed his mind again and said there would be seven.
--
Christian "naddy" Weisgerber
naddy@mips.inka.de
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