The Chaplain's War by Brad R. Torgerson

Published by Baen on October 7, 2014

"Humans are superior to all alien life forms because, gosh darn it, we're human" was a popular theme of 1950s science fiction. It has gradually given way to a more sophisticated view in modern sf (except for movies that imagine aliens as lizard invaders), but The Chaplain's War is a throwback to the days when a belief in human superiority was steadfast.

In the 22nd century, alien mantes (plural of mantis) rule Purgatory and have imprisoned the humans who tried to invade it. The invasion was retaliatory, following strikes against human worlds by the mantes, but was in retrospect unwise. The mantes feel a need to wipe out competitive life forms as they expand their colonization of habitable planets. Their new expansion will move through all planets colonized by humans until it reaches Earth. Sucks to be human!

But wait, since humans are superior (if technologically inferior), perhaps humanity can yet be saved. A mantis called "the professor" wants to learn about belief in God from a chaplain's assistant before the mantes wipe out the remaining human life on Purgatory, where they have imprisoned human POWs for no clear reason. The chaplain's assistant, Harrison Barlow, is nondenominational and not particularly religious, having been pressed into the role as a military assignment. At the request of the chaplain, who conveniently dies, Barlow builds a chapel on Purgatory but plays no secular role, other than explaining God to the alien professor.

There are some clever moments in The Chaplain's War. Most of them occur early in the novel. For example, some members of Barlow's congregation, believing in an angry, judgmental, Old Testament God, reason that the mantes are God's true children, dispatched on a holy mission to wipe out the sinful human race. That conclusion is not rooted in logic, given that the mantes do not accept the existence of God, but logic rarely informs religious belief.

Much less interesting are the obligatory scenes of recruitment and training that are standard fare in military sf, presented here in unnecessary flashbacks that add needless length to the novel. The flashbacks only become interesting when Barlow is trained to be a chaplain's assistant in a war zone. That, at least, is fresh.

The flashbacks eventually catch up to the present, in which the chaplain's assistant is taking a nonviolent, peacemaking approach to the war by trying to persuade the mantes of human worth. Every now and then he points out how humans are, in fact, superior to mantes. "We're better than you so you should see things our way" is not one of the better negotiating tools in the diplomat's briefcase but perhaps the mantes will agree with Barrow and stop slaughtering humans. You'll need to read the novel to find out.

The novel preaches the need to respect people's right to hold religious beliefs that are not our own, a position with which I firmly agree even if the novel's message is delivered without subtlety. More subtle is a pro-Christian, anti-Muslim bias which, fortunately, makes only a rare appearance. I was less enthralled with the assistant's sense of morality ("no, I will not have sex with the hot naked woman who just crawled into my sleeping bag because we are not in love") which seems like another throwback to the 1950s.

Cheesy sentences like "I flattened to the deck as weapons belched instant death over my head" will win no literary awards but, for the most part, the quality of Brad Torgersen's writing is reasonable. While The Chaplain's War gives a new twist to an old story, too much of the novel is an unimaginative regurgitation of stale scenes from countless military sf novels. This might have worked better as a short story or as a tight short novel.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS