Alien invasion stories have been a staple of science fiction since the genre began. War is a great catalyst for technological innovation. These two linked ideas / themes come together in Will McIntosh’s Defenders. In the near future, Earth is attacked by the Luyten, giant alien starfish intent on taking over the world and making it their own. As humanity fights back, the world bands together in their goal to find a weapon that will successfully combat the Luyten forces. Making this more difficult is the fact that the Luyten can read our thoughts. It isn’t to revealing of a spoiler to say that a weapon is crafted in the form of 16 foot tall super-soldiers created from human DNA. These soldiers are called Defenders, after all, but much of McIntosh’s brilliant novel focuses on the aftermath of the war and how the world adjusts to such a changed landscape that includes not one, but two intelligent species.
McIntosh tells the story from three primary points of view: Oliver Bowen, Kai Zhou, and Lila Easterlin and an occasional POV chapter from Dominique Wiewall. Oliver is a scientist working for the government who soon becomes a liaison to the Luyten, specifically to the Luyten known as Five. Kai was mentally connected to Five during the war, Lila’s family was killed in the war against the Luyten, and Dominique Wiewall is highly placed in the government and the creator of the Defenders. Through the first half of the novel, we get to know these characters, how the war with the Luyten affected them (drastically, natch) and the path this put them on to deal with the world once the Defenders were created in to save the human race.
The second half of the novel is fall-out…and what a spectacular fall-out it is. Each of the three primary characters is dealing with his or her version of PTSD; Kai because of the physical effects of the war (and more so later on because of added physical problems); Oliver is suffering emotional PTSD due to his close contact with Five; and Lila is dealing with psychological PTSD because of the loss of her family, among other things. Now, this could all be simple and straightforward storytelling, but because of the great work of character building in the early portion of the novel by McIntosh, the post-Luyten world these characters face is all the more powerful.
What makes Defenders such an incredible novel is McIntosh’s pure elegance, the beauty of its simplicity. Each element of the novel, the characters, the situations, the world, the results of the world’s actions, organically feed into each other as the novel progresses. Oliver could very easily have been the typical geeky scientist and there are elements of that in him; he’s a bit socially awkward for example. However, it isn’t a defining trait. Wiewall could, in the hands of a writer with lesser skill at fleshing out characters, been the proverbial bitch on wheels so many women in power are painted as with shallow strokes. However, in the (relative to other characters) small amount of space we are in Wiewall’s head, she comes across as a woman who is admirably head-strong, as well as flawed and nervous. In other words, she’s reads like a real, living and breathing person.
While not specifically a Military Science Fiction novel, the Military features heavily in the novel. Aside from the prologue which introduces a handful of soldiers, the only real soldiers we truly see are the Defenders themselves. What McIntosh does is play out the effect of military action on people who were caught up in a global war. This provides a more philosophical angle to be explored, specifically the ramifications of the quickest (and first) fix and quite honestly, the only plausible fix humanity seemed to have when backed into a proverbial corner when survival is the topmost concern.
Defenders is the type of novel that perfectly blends and old-school science fictional themes with modern sensibilities / worldview. I will be shocked if it isn’t on the shortlist for all the genre novel awards for which it will be eligible.
HIGHLY RECOMMENDED
© 2014 Rob H. Bedford
Orbit May 2014
Trade Paperback ISBN 978-0-316-21776-7 512 Pages
http://willmcintosh.net/
Review copy courtesy of the publisher, Orbit
