A Matter For Men (1983) by David Gerrold is the first book in The War Against The Chtorr series. On the surface A Matter For Men is a war story against a hostile invader. However, the truth is more complex and, perhaps, terrifying. Gerrold delivers a novel that stands out from the myriad of SF invasion stories whose only point is to glorify war.
After the horrors of nuclear war, multiple plagues, and civil unrest humanity is fighting to survive on its own. Unfortunately they are not so lucky. The sudden appearance of the new race dubbed the Chtorr has set Earth reeling.
Jim McCarthy, newly conscripted into the army, soon comes face to face with the realities of the Chtorr. Given no training and almost no support Jim is now an exobiologist with the job of discovering the origins of the Chtorr. And a way to kill them.
Jim wants to take his work seriously but it seems his superiors have other ideas. Encountering the Chtorr face-to-face rocks Jim to his core. But when he starts asking the wrong questions things go from bad to worse. Fighting the Chtorr is lethal. Fighting his superiors, murderous.
At first blush reading A Matter For Men feels like a more liberal and updated (somewhat) version of Robert A. Heinlein’s Starship Troopers (1959). In the first few chapters Gerrold pays homage to Heinlein’s work and voice. However, that soon changes.
The story follows Jim back and forth through his life. Jumping from Jim’s present life in the military to various points in previous life, Gerrold builds a picture of the world Jim lives in. This allows Gerrold to reveal things in the order he chooses. This works well, for the most part.
Jim himself, though, is a rather stupid character. Gerrold imbues Jim with a deep moral conflict and superior intelligence, it’s just that Jim makes the same mistakes over and over. It’s infuriating at times. However, Gerrold does this to be sure his points are coming across.
In the early stages of the novel I came close to setting it aside as it seemed like it was going to be another rah-rah, go USA, let’s fight type of book. Fortunately, that is not the case at all. Gerrold, at times, goes into somewhat protracted monologues of political ideology. Some reader may enjoy this but regardless of your view it’s important to read and digest them.
If you take A Matter For Men at face value it seems like a war-hawks wet dream. It outlines a system of government and public relations that will lead to a population clamouring for a war against whatever enemy said government chooses. But nothing could be further from the truth.
A Matter For Men outlines these steps to use as a checklist to determine whether a government is in the process of initiating such a war. If we see governments behaving in the way they do in A Matter For Men then the government must change. This makes A Matter For Men an important anti-war novel whose time has come once again.
And if that isn’t enough, A Matter For Men delves into other areas that are extremely important today, especially ecology. Written at time when people were only dimly aware of the ecological crises to come, Gerrold speculates deeply into what it takes to change the climate of the world. His views are, of course, fictitious, but they have the same outcome. A world where human life is incompatible with its environment.
While A Matter For Men may not be the most literary or brilliant SF novel ever written, it has much to say and does so in a relatively entertaining way. And if it seems pointless to read the first book in a series that will never see completion you are wrong. Reading A Matter For Men as a single novel doesn’t diminish it in any way.
As I stated earlier A Matter For Men begins as an homage to Starship Troopers and in the end it returns to that homage. The ending is strongly reminiscent of the open ending of Starship Troopers both in tone and attitude.
I would recommend A Matter For Men for readers who find discussions of politics, sociology, ecology, or science interesting. For readers looking for a guts and glory type story, look elsewhere. A Matter For Men ended up being quite a surprise. I went in expecting one thing but it turned out be nothing like I expected. And that is one of the hallmarks of great SF.
