David Gerrold's War Against the Chtorr

David Gerrold has had a long history of reworking materials and themes from Grandmaster and prominent Science Fiction writer Robert Anson Heinlein. David Gerrold's famous Star Trek episode, "The Trouble With Tribbles" featured the tribbles which by David Gerrold's own admission derived from Robert Heinlein's martian flatcats.

David Gerrold's novella, "The Man Who Folded Himself" borrows its concept and portions of its plot from Robert Heinlein's famous short story, "All You Zombies," which featured a man traveling through time to impregnate himself and eventually give birth to himself as well. Gerrold's reworking of this theme was significantly lower on scientific credibility than Heinlein's more Hard SF approach.

David Gerrold's "War Against the Chtorr" series is essentially his version of Robert Heinlein's famous or perhaps infamous novel, "Starship Troopers." "Starship Troopers" has been alternately praised and awarded as well as condemned and vilified as a defense of militarism and a totalitarian state.

In "Starship Troopers", an alien war against humanity forces mankind to adapt and under a military run global state, fight a remorseless war against the Bugs and their alien allies using strict and unforgiving military discipline. In the world of "Starship Troopers" citizenship is only extended to those who have served in the military. The book's narrative views those who have not served and yet have an opinion with clear contempt. It also features military discipline complete with physical violence and a hanging. In the end the "weak-minded" civilian father is redeemed through military service with his son.

David Gerrold's own Starship Troopers, his "War Against the Chtorr" series differs in that begins before the full onslaught of the invasion. The novel of the series, "A Matter for Men " periodically flashes back before the invasion to Jim McCarthy's high school class which features extended segments strongly resembling the classroom segments in "Starship Troopers" in which an informed Heinlein persona delivers the "truth" about how objective and ruthless the real world is. It also covers a period during the viral attack, a series of contagious plagues which wipe out most of mankind, that prove to have been part of the Chtorran invasion. Overall however "A Matter for Men " focuses on the early days of fighting the Chtorran worms, which can devour human and animal life, as well as Jim McCarthy's early service in the covert version of the Special Forces, as well as his first encounters with the Chtorran ecology.

As the series progresses the spread of the Chtorran ecosystem which consumes and subsumes the native Terran ecosystem. Rather than a mere armed assault by giant bugs, the Chtorran invasion consists of an entire alien ecosystem displacing and consuming Earth's native life beginning at the bacterial level, all the way up to the human level and the largest lifeforms including the whales. The Chtorran invasion is unlike any other because it consists of a total war of annihilation from the microscopic to the macroscopic. All attempts to fight it ultimately prove futile and the spread of the Chtorran ecosystem parallels the more ruthless and totalitarian measures being undertaken by the government against it.

By the fourth novel, "A Season for Slaughter", the entire population of the United States has been forcibly drafted into the military and all private property needed for the war effort repossessed. This is actually going further than Heinlein himself went in "Starship Troopers." In what may be an intentional, but is more likely an unintentional irony, all the covert political and military maneuverings achieve nothing and each novel finds the human race has taken an even worse beating and retreated even further. By the third novel, "A Rage for Revenge", the capital of the United States has been relocated to Hawaii, nuclear weapons have been used near the Rocky Mountains to no effect and the United States has been effectively cut in half. By the fourth novel humanity's only real fallback plan is to escape into space.

The "War Against the Chtorr" series however is nowhere near the simplistic paean to the military or the virtues of the totalitarian state. Though the novels come with stock Heinlein characters including the Reverend Foreman, Lizard and of course the alter ego of Solomon Short, Jim McCarthy does not neatly fall into line, but often resents and struggles against the authority figures. In the first novel, "A Matter for Men", they set up Jim to be killed by a Chtorran worm as part of a plan to demonstrate the Chtorran threat by allowing the worm to kill hundreds of Fourth World delegates who have been skeptical about the dangers of the Chtorran invasion.

The third novel dives deeply into Jim McCarthy's brainwashing both by a human renegade cult living with the Chtorr and feeding their own children to it and later by a group led by the Reverend Foreman practicing the Mode Training, which is a fictional take off on EST, which itself was derived from Scientology. (Interestingly enough while David Gerrold's introduction emphasized that no Mode Training existed and none would be offered, he now appears to have developed an interest in promoting some form of Mode Training.) Scientology was the work of L. Ron Hubbard, a friend of Robert Heinlein. The unified premise that runs through all of them is that human beings can be "trained" to be more effective and better human beings by exposing and mastering unconscious processes.

The "War Against the Chtorr" series remains unfinished with three more books yet to go. It is unknown exactly how these three remaining volumes will shape the overall framework of the series. However for the moment "War Against the Chtorr" seems rooted in fundamentally Heinleinsque traditions from the explorations of alternate human sexuality to a militaristic centralized authority as the best defense against an alien invasion and the awakening of humanity from its "zombiefied" state to actively participate in the struggle for its own survival.