Chimera by T.C. McCarthy

Published by Orbit on July 31, 2012

The war is over (or so it appears) but Stanley Resnick is still fighting.  His job -- the only element of his life that brings him joy -- is to track down and destroy rogue Germlines, the genetically engineered female warriors who have chosen not to meet their scheduled deaths.  The Germlines are designed to spoil like rotting meat after two years, but Germlines are starting to appear who, long after their expiration date, show no signs of spoilage.  Of course, you know that if you read Germline, the first novel in the Subterrene War trilogy (if you haven’t read Germline, you should, both to give context to Chimera and because it is an excellent novel).

Resnick is assigned to track down Margaret, a Germline last seen in Exogene.  The hope is that Margaret will lead Resnick to Dr. Chen, who is suspected of deactivating the Germlines’ safety protocols, thus granting them continued life.  The hitch:  Margaret has become a religious icon in Thailand.  Together with her protégé Lucy, Margaret lives under the protection of the Thai government, while Catherine (who died in Exogene) has achieved a status akin to sainthood.  Resnick undertakes the assignment with the help of Jihoon Kim, a linguist and analyst whose former job involved keeping track of borderline psychopaths like Resnick.

Chimera sharpens the conflict between humans and the Germlines (who consider themselves closer to God than the nonbred) while adding another sort of soldier bred in tanks, this one a creation of the Chinese, an abomination that lives its life within an armored suit, an enemy of humans and Germlines alike.  Margaret, in turn, has created a group of followers called the Gra Jaai -- nonbred humans who nonetheless revere Catherine and learn “how to get closer to God through killing.”  Nothing could be less human than the Chinese genetics, yet Lucy wonders whether they have a soul, while Resnick can’t imagine that Lucy has one.  As was true of the first two novels, questions of religion and the meaning of life and death pervade the story.  Chimera adds a new question:  whether humanity (whatever we mean by that term) is really worth fighting for.

T.C. McCarthy is a master of characterization.  His readers will not be disappointed by his newest creation.  Resnick is so acclimated to combat that crazy is normal.  Resnick no longer fits safely within civilian society -- not that American society, with its complete lack of privacy, is a place he really wants to be.  Everything is a war to Resnick because war is all he knows.  He finds it easy to kill Germlines -- he is, in fact, addicted to it -- and his ever-present anger is easily displaced, making him a threat to pretty much everyone.  Still, McCarthy never settles for a simplistic characterization.  Resnick is thus torn by conflict:  he loves and hates war; he feels the need to protect and to abandon the son he didn’t father; his instinct is to kill Margaret yet he questions that desire as he comes to understand her.

McCarthy has given careful thought to the geopolitics of the messed up future he’s created.  There’s sort of an Apocalypse Now/Heart of Darkness feel to the story, with Margaret playing the role of Kurtz, right down to the corpses staked to poles in her jungle compound.  The jungle has a life and a madness of its own.  As always, McCarthy's combat imagery is vivid.  Battle scenes are tense; the combatants’ fear is palpable.  Throughout the novel, McCarthy’s prose is electrically charged.

Each novel in the trilogy has its own strengths.  Germline has the most poignant character.  Exogene has the best action.  Chimera reveals the big picture and raises serious philosophical questions.  I’m not sure which of the three I like best (there’s plenty of characterization, action, and philosophy in each), although I had the strongest emotional response to Germline.  I recommend them all, not just to fans of military science fiction but to any reader who appreciates good storytelling. 

RECOMMENDED

Exogene by T.C. McCarthy

Published by Orbit on March 1, 2012

Germline, the first novel of The Subterrene War series, told the story of a journalist who became a part of the war he was covering, participating in battles and growing emotionally attached to genetically bred female soldiers called Germlines.  In Exogene, the second novel in the series, the focus is on one of the Germlines, a genetic named Catherine.  “Faith and death” is the genetic creed.  Combat is a test of faith; death is the welcome reward, the entrance to a promised afterlife.  Yet the reality of war changes people, even people who have been nurtured in vats and programmed to kill.

Catherine is a perfect killer. At 16 1/2, she is the finest genetic soldier ever produced in America.  Yet Catherine begins to feel an unnatural (for a genetic) will to survive, a fear of death that may or may not be an early onset of the “spoiling” that awaits her at the end of her service.  We know from the first novel that Germlines begin to rot away when they turn eighteen.  We also know that despite being conditioned to accept that fate (while craving a more meaningful death on the battlefield), genetics occasionally try to run, to escape the war before reaching their expiration date, an effort that will prove to be futile -- or so they are told by their human creators.

Catherine’s story initially centers on her attempt to escape her makers and her engineered fate.  She eventually falls into the hands of male genetics bred as Russian soldiers.  The Russians are working on something new -- an Exogenic Enhancement, a hybrid of human and machine -- and who knows what the Chinese are doing (not to mention the Koreans).  Hating Americans and Russians about equally, Catherine must make a choice about her future, and it is that choice that drives the novel’s second half.  Since Catherine is handicapped by hallucinations in the form of flashbacks as her mind begins to erode, the second half blends Catherine’s present with snatches of her gritty past.  Yet as the story unfolds and as Catherine’s conception of her purpose evolves, we begin to suspect that Catherine’s moments of superficial clarity are unhinged from reality.  Whether due to spoiling or the drugs she was given or religious rhapsody, Catherine sometimes seems a tad crazy.  That, of course, makes her an interesting character.

While T.C. McCarthy writes combat scenes that are as vivid and exciting as nearly any I’ve encountered in military science fiction, he also writes with poignancy that is too often missing from the genre’s war stories.  McCarthy imbues his characters with greater depth than is common in action-driven stories.  His vision of the future is interesting and more credible than most military sf novels I’ve read.

McCarthy makes impressive use of religion as the force that motivates the Germlines.  The belief that killing is the path to salvation is a common feature of religious zealotry, a point that has been made often enough in fiction, but McCarthy takes it a step beyond the ordinary:  What happens when a zealot begins to suspect that she is not serving God but is killing to serve secular masters? Or, in terms of McCarthy’s story, what happens when a genetic begins to worry that she is not a perfect instrument of God, but a flawed creation of man?  When a genetic who is conditioned to hope the war will never end begins to long for -- not exactly peace, but a chance to kill on her own terms, to destroy an enemy of her own choosing?  There is something both intellectually and emotionally engaging about Catherine’s redefinition of her life’s purpose.  Perhaps Exogene is about the true meaning of freedom (nothing left to lose?) but I think its meaning is open to other interpretations, particularly in light of an unexpected ending that made me question my understanding of Catherine.  That’s one of the things I like about Exogene and Germline:  the novels work as high energy action stories but they operate on other levels as well, giving the reader political and philosophical meat to chew upon.

I felt for the journalist in Germline more deeply than I connected with Catherine, but I think Exogene is in many ways a more cohesive work than its predecessor, and the better of the two novels, albeit only slightly.  Both are worth reading, and I look forward to the next installment.

RECOMMENDED

Germline by T.C. McCarthy

Published by Orbit on July 26, 2011

This is the second military science fiction novel I’ve read in recent months that is told from a journalist’s point of view (the other is Dan Abnett’s Embedded).  Germline is by far the better of the two: the characters have more depth, the battle scenes are more realistic (the emphasis is on survival rather than gunning down hoards of enemy troops), the plot is more complex, and the focus is on the internal damage that war inflicts on soldiers rather than the external bloodshed (although fans of gore and decapitation will be well satisfied).

Marines are fighting Russians in Kazakhstan, in tunnels and on the ground, to gain control of ores and minerals that both sides would like to mine.  Reporter Oscar Wendell  is embedded with the Marines, getting high and hoping to stay alive long enough to win a Pulitzer.  Given a choice, Wendell and the Marines prefer to be in the tunnels (the subterrene) where, surrounded by rock walls, they’re less likely to be shot or burned to a cinder -- unless the enemy tunnels into a chamber occupied by soldiers and fills it with plasma. 

Fighting alongside (or ahead of) the Marines are genetically engineered teenage girls who move “like lighting on speed.”  According to Wendell, the Genetics look like killers but smell like they should be “sitting in school, driving guys crazy with a miniskirt.”  I have to wonder whether T.C. McCarthy threw them into the mix on the assumption that the majority of sf fans are young (or not so young) men who will enjoy reading about genetically engineered teenage girls who look like “a track team gone bad.”  Why not fight the war with genetically engineered teenage boys?  Because boys don’t smell like they would look good in miniskirts?  We eventually learn that genetically engineered males do exist but, like so many things, they aren’t American made.  We also learn that American defense contractors don’t make genetically engineered boys for reasons that (when they are finally revealed) didn’t strike me as convincing.

Silly as all this sounds, McCarthy at least builds some interest into the factory-made girls; they’re programmed to fight and die but they retain most human instincts (including, of course, the desire to kiss Wendell).  Although the Genetics are trained to believe in “death and faith” and are designed to rot away after they turn eighteen (a less appealing fate than the glorious death in combat they are conditioned to crave), Wendell finds that he prefers them to human women, apparently because they are less complicated (a characteristic Wendell identifies as “innocence”).  Perhaps too predictably, Wendall develops feelings for a couple of Genetics (unlike the Marines, who seem to be creeped out by them).  There are echoes of Blade Runner here, with its replicants who want to continue living past their expiration dates, but fortunately Germline follows a somewhat different path.

There’s more to this novel than fighting, but war pervades the story.  The combat imagery is vivid and intense, making Germline rich in atmosphere.   Germline is nevertheless at its best when the spotlight moves from war to Wendell.

Wendell’s self-destructive tendencies make him an intriguing character.  He’s often fighting his own demons:  his fear, his occasional death wish, his desire to tune out the war in a haze of drugs, his need for attachment to a female even if she isn’t a real person.  Wendell experiences personal growth (or at least change, for better or worse) during the course of the novel.  He has a better understanding of his nature and -- as he comes to understand a Genetic -- begins to question what it is to be human when thoughts and personality are shaped by war’s dehumanizing experiences.  The last chapter contains some surprisingly strong writing about the aftermath of war as Wendell, like every combat veteran, realizes that he can never be the person he was before the war, that he must adapt to a new way of living.  This aspect of the novel is very well done.

Germline is the first book in a series called The Subterrene War.  I hope the others are as strong as this one.

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