July 2012
ISBN 978-0-316-12817-9
Mass Market Paperback, 384 Pages
Volume 3 of http://www.sffworld.com/brevoff/165.html trilogy
www.orbitbooks.net
http://tcmccarthy.com/
Review copy courtesy of the publisher
Stan “Bug” Resnick is an entrenched soldier, a man who has been killing and participating in the theater of war for the majority of his adult life. War is the only state of the world in which he finds the closest thing to comfort for when he returns home to his estranged wife, he suffers mentally and physically; he’s been on the front lines of the Subterrene War. As the war concluded, his job became that of a hunter, he was tasked with finding and destroying the genetically engineering super-soldiers featured in T.C. McCarthy’s previous two installments of The Subterrene War trilogy, Germlineand Exogene.
Bleak, dirty, confined, stressful, uncomfortable… these words only begin to hint at the type of story McCarthy tells in Chimera, the concluding volume of the trilogy. Keeping these rather unpleasant themes together was the compelling power of McCarthy’s narrative. In Chimera, Stan is our first person narrator and the angst he feels throughout the novel is palpable. He resents his wife, he initially blames himself for his old partner’s death, and he hates the germline soldiers (genetically engineered super soldiers) most of all. Stan immediately dislikes his new partner whom who Stan gives a racially derogatory nickname/callsign of Chong. About the only characters with which he gets along are his wife’s son (who is the result of an affair with a nameless man from the factory where the genetically engineered soldiers are created) and the artificial intelligence housed in his body armor, Kristen.
Resnick is barely home when he’s called out on another mission with his new partner. This mission doesn’t seem to have a return in the agenda, but since securing one of the germline soldiers who defected and attained a sort of awareness is the end goal, as well as the scientist behind new genetic programs deep in the jungles of the enemy territory, Stan eventually accepts.
Despite being a person filled with a lot of hate, and a man who has spent a great deal of his life as a ruthless killer, McCarthy has built up an ample amount of empathy for Stan and his plight. The reasons behind his actions often confound his partner Chong, but as Stan descends further into the darkness of the jungle and his mission, he holds one beacon of hope – the salvation of Philip, his wife’s son who he begins to think of as his own son. The things he encounters, more genetically engineered soldiers, are less and less human. In addition to the female soldiers, he encounters something the Chinese have developed that is only the slimmest margin of human by appearance. With each step deeper in the jungle up to and beyond meeting the ‘leader’ of the female soldiers Margaret, Stan can’t help but take a deeper look at himself and consider his own humanity. He compares his own ideology to that of the genetically programmed ideology of the female soldiers. A lot of these scenes give a hint that McCarthy might be as adept at plying his trade as a horror writer as he is as an SF Writer.
A lot of Military SF is written in the first person narrative (Starship Troopers, Orphanage, etc) so getting an intimate view of war from the soldier’s point of view is a common theme for such novels/stories. Often; however, the virtues and/or the sense of adventure is a minor theme in Military SF. While there is indeed a quest and adventure aspect to McCarthy’s Chimera, the underlying thing that came across to me was just how much war sucks, how much it can dehumanize a person, and how very little of a person’s individual humanity can remain after years of service in the theater of war. I’d hesitate to toss out the whole idea of these books being cautionary tales because that would assume the postulations in the story are far from being reality. Rather, McCarthy convincingly placed me as the reader in the present of the novel, that this is how war is being fought and the horrors of it are implanted on those participating in the trenches.
In addition to the horrors of war, McCarthy’s claustrophobic feel extends to personal freedoms. When ‘out’ of the theater of war, at home, or in civilian life, Stan, like all citizens, is constantly monitored. He is unable to have any private discussion with his estranged wife and only when he is in the deepest, least civilized sections of the jungles does Stan come close to feeling unsurveilled. This ratchets up the paranoia level and the theme of no privacy is something the great Philip K. Dick returned to often in his fiction. Although published last year (2012) and written before that, the recent world news that the NSA has been monitoring telephone conversations of American citizens only speaks in greater strength to the relevancy of loss of personal freedom that is commonplace in McCarthy’s imagined future.
As a whole, The Subterrene War trilogy is more of a thematic trilogy, since the three books don’t tell a continuous story, though Chimera does mention characters who appeared in Exogene. I would even go as far to say that it might be possible read these three books without adhering to the published order. Each of the three novels gives a different perspective on war, the first, Germline from a reporter caught on the firing line; the second, Exogene, from the perspective of one of the genetically engineered super-soldiers. McCarthy may have saved the most poignant for the last since this does focus on a soldier who lived and breathed the Subterrene War. Chimera is an excellent novel in and of itself and it is an excellent capstone to a spectacular and essential series of Military SF.
High Recommendation for both this novel and the trilogy as a whole.
© 2013 Rob H. Bedford
A genuinely excellent trilogy. Sometimes it was a really tough read due to it’s uncompromising realism. I found Chimera the hardest one to get into as it was so bleak. There is no optimism whatsoever.
I enjoyed that McCarthy wrote each book in a different style and perspective.