From: naddy@mips.inka.de   
      
   On 2025-11-07, Lynn McGuire  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   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)