The War Against the Chtorr


The War Against the Chtorr is a series of science fiction novels by American writer David Gerrold.

Books in the series

The Chtorr series was originally planned as a trilogy, but as the story became more intricate, Gerrold realized that three books would not be enough for him to tell the entire story. For a time, he was uncertain how many books there would be in the end but plans on seven., four books have been completed., a fifth and sixth were in the works, 24 years after the publication of the fourth book.

''A Matter for Men'' (1983)

After mysterious and deadly viruses decimate the world's population, strange and violent alien creatures, dubbed the Chtorr, start to appear. Jim McCarthy is a military scientist tasked with clearing a nest of worms, one of the more well known types of Chtorr. He notices that they have a level of intelligence and brings back three eggs for further analysis. Back at base, he learns that political squabbling is getting in the way of making any real progress on understanding the invasion. He is soon recruited to a mysterious group known only as "Uncle Ira" who dedicate themselves to clearing out the Chtorr at any cost. In a presentation demonstrating a live Chtorran worm to a visiting group of dignitaries, the worm breaks loose and kills several people before it's stopped by McCarthy. He quickly realizes that the massacre, and his death, were planned by Uncle Ira as a way of getting the international community to wake up to the Chtorran problem. Along the way, Jim's best friend and sometimes lover, Ted, decides to join the Telepathy Corps, and to Jim's chagrin, seems to be losing himself to a larger hive mind.

''A Day for Damnation'' (1985)

On a mission in deep Chtorran territory, Jim McCarthy and his crew crash their helicopter in a blizzard of strange pink fuzz. The crew takes this opportunity to observe previously unknown aspects of the Chtorran life cycles and ecology. Particularly interesting is an odd ritual observed between bunnymen, one of the types of alien lifeforms they see while stranded that resemble humanoid rabbits, and worms where they seem to play together in harmony. Upon return to San Francisco, McCarthy spends some time studying the zombie phenomena that surfaced soon after the invasion; massive groups of people seem to lose all but the most basic animal intelligence and wander aimlessly in herds, occasionally luring in others who get too close. Seeing a similarity between the zombies and the bunnyman/worm rituals, McCarthy briefly allows himself to join the zombie herd in order to study them, and only barely manages to be rescued and restored to his former self. Using what he learned, he leads a team near a nest of worms and attempts communication like the bunnymen. Although the experiment seems to work initially, the worms turn violent and attack the humans and other Chtorr.

'' A Rage for Revenge'' (1989)

The third book in the series alternates between two stories, Jim McCarthy experiences Mode Training and flashbacks to his time in a cult. On a routine mission, McCarthy's platoon is overwhelmed by a group of renegade humans. He is taken prisoner and slowly brainwashed into the lifestyle of the cult and their leader, Jason Delandro. The cult believes in serving the Chtorr and have several worms on their campgrounds, although only a few high-up members are allowed to know the worms' secrets. The cult also practices a type of hedonism, characterized by free love including pedophilia. On an expedition, Jim discovers a military base with a working radio. Snapping back to his senses, he calls in the renegades' location, then wanders aimlessly in the wilderness while fighting an emotional internal battle over having betrayed the renegades. Jim heads to a peninsula on the California coast where his mother used to live, called Family, and adopts three orphans. When Family's leaders ignore his demands for anti-Chtorran defenses, a group of worms break into the grounds and slaughter many of the Family, including his adopted children. Jim realizes that the worms were led by Delandro and manages to capture and execute him. Jim flees Family and after a hallucinatory experience brought on by the Chtorran ecology, he is picked up in a helicopter by Colonel Elizabeth 'Lizard' Tirelli. Jim is sent to Mode Training to learn to overcome basic human psychology. As a final test in the training, the group is forced to accept the death of one of their own, Jim, by the hand of the leader Daniel Foreman. The gun Foreman was using turns out to be loaded with blanks, and as the group accepted his death, they pass the course. Tirelli and McCarthy had previously been romantically involved, and they expand that relationship after Tirelli leads McCarthy to testify in a meeting with the President of the United States regarding the need to drop a nuclear bomb on the heavy Chtorran infestations in the Rockies, arguing that the people who live there are no longer human.

''A Season for Slaughter'' (1993)

Leading a patrol, Jim McCarthy is annoyed by a senior officer from Montreal who insisted on coming along but does not understand the gravity of the situation. In order to get him out of the way, McCarthy tricks him into thinking that the two of them had walked into the sensory network of a live shambler grove and were likely to be eaten alive by the grove's residents. In reality, the grove looked dead, but the officer did not know this and agreed on record to cede all authority to McCarthy. While examining the grove, the scientists discover a massive womb-like structure beneath it that they theorize is the place where all the Chtorran life forms were formed when they fell to Earth. After being reprimanded by his commanding officer, McCarthy is sent on a mission to an area of the Amazon rainforest with some of the heaviest infestations anywhere. The mission commandeers a massive dirigible originally built as a pleasure craft before the invasion. Aboard the ship, McCarthy and Tirelli finally marry. When trying to figure out a way of communication with the worms via flashing lights, the team accidentally sets off a Chtorran war where the worms battle each other in a massive slaughter. On the way home the flight crew realize too late that Chtorran stingbugs have created too many holes in the helium chambers, causing a massive loss of lift gases. Quickly dumping cargo, the ship heads back to civilization as fast as possible but crashes when still several miles in Chtorran territory. Fearing that Liz is dead, Jim hears her voice on a radio briefly. To rescue her he contacts a government official, a woman with Down syndrome and brain implants who McCarthy correctly surmises is an unwitting member of the Telepathy Corps, and utilizes their communications network to request a search for Tirelli. Although Liz is eventually found, the book ends with everyone still awaiting rescue.

''A Nest for Nightmares''

In June 2015, the fifth book was reportedly slated for release September 2015 but according to the author, at the end of August 2015 only the first draft was finished and given to beta readers.
On March 14, 2017, Gerrold announced that the fifth book would be titled A Nest for Nightmares, and A Method for Madness would be the sixth book, with both books nearing completion.

''A Method for Madness''

On March 14, 2017, Gerrold announced A Method for Madness would be the sixth book.

Plot

Set in a devastated early 21st century United States with logical expected advances in current technology such as a fledgling moon base, this series of science-fiction novels describe the invasion of Earth by an alien ecology. The story is unusual in that the tactics used by the aliens eschew the usual direct attack in favor of terraforming the ecosystem.
The United States has suffered serious political and social upheavals. These have come from unintended consequences of US government choices regarding geopolitical crises and interventionism. In the timeline of the books, there had been another US/Eastern Bloc proxy war -- between the State of Israel and certain other Middle Eastern nations -- in the recent past. This had been similar to a larger, higher-technology version of the 1967 Arab-Israeli conflict, the 1973 Arab–Israeli War, and others. The books do not explain the detailed conduct of the fictional new war, neither do they state which countries fought Israel.
In the summer of 1997, Israel had deployed a nuclear weapon — and the world's perception was that Israel had done so at the instructions of the United States. In a case rather like a reversal of the Cuban Missile Crisis, America had been placed under an explicit nuclear ultimatum from the Soviet Union. Modern printings of the books, however, state that the ultimatum came from Russia.
The unnamed President of the United States had refused to accept that a nuclear World War III was inevitable, so he had decided to travel to Moscow, where in the year 2000 “the Millennium Treaties” had been signed. The United States had been substantially hobbled by the Millennium Treaties. Years later there had been subsequent treaties after the United States entered a bitter war in Pakistan. The US failed in its objectives there, and it was given another nuclear ultimatum. The second ultimatum came from the People's Republic of China. As a result, the United States was required to greatly weaken its armed forces, to comply with new bans on certain weapon systems, to make official statements of culpability for warmongering, and to undertake new programs of civic education for the young that were supposed to establish precautions against the possibility of Americans making choices to start future wars. Also, the United States was made to pay heavy reparations to the international community. America's network of allies continues to realign and break apart. Other countries continue to become more hostile, even though it is not always in a military sense of hostility.
U.S. leaders respond by stimulating the domestic economy with large investments in new technologies. Secondly, the U.S. manages to surreptitiously re-structure the reparations required under the Millennium Treaties. The new US national security strategy is subtle, and has a focus on making other countries more reliant on the United States. This was done through applying economic diplomacy, sharp power, soft power, and other measures to increase foreign dependency on a variety of assets and systems controlled or heavily influenced by America. These include America's new generations of advanced robotic systems, American space-based solar power technologies, American food exports, American space transportation systems such as spaceplanes, and newly expanded efforts by agencies such as the Peace Corps and USAID.
In great secrecy, the American government continues work on advanced military technologies, dual-use technologies, and finding means to leverage the revolution in military affairs to gain advantage in this radically new geopolitical situation. The books give attention to such things as high-energy microwave weapons, cyberwarfare, military teleoperation, and intelligent agents that can be militarized. All these efforts are forbidden under the Millennium Treaties.
Soon afterwards, a lengthy onslaught of devastating plagues sweeps the world, killing 60% of humanity. As the survivors struggle to rebuild civilization, they gradually discover that hundreds of alien plant and animal species have mysteriously begun to entrench themselves. All these strange species are far more opportunistic and aggressive than the native organisms occupying the same ecological niches. As a result, Earth's entire ecology is being rapidly supplanted. The invaders are called Chtorrans after the sound made by the most deadly predator encountered so far.
There are no signs of sentient aliens, but humans presume the invasion to be deliberate, either "seeded" from space or brought by undetected spacecraft. Many of the Chtorran organisms exhibit behaviors that are quasi-sentient.
The books largely follow the adventures of Jim McCarthy, a scientist and soldier in the U.S. Army, who attempts to understand the Chtorran ecology even as he engages in combat to destroy it. His early efforts primarily focus on the "Worms", a particularly large and dangerous apex predator Chtorran species whose prey consists largely of human beings. McCarthy and other scientists investigate the rapidly expanding webs of Chtorran ecosystems and attempt to unravel the relationships between the species.
In addition to descriptions of alien ecology, the Chtorr series includes lengthy expositions on various aspects of human psychology, particularly under wartime and survival conditions.

Characters

Chtorran ecology was designed in large part by British reproductive biologist Jack Cohen. It is quite complete and consistent, making it hard science fiction.
If there are two things that all Chtorran life forms have in common, it is that they are hungry, and that they change. Virtually all Chtorran life forms engage in some form of symbiosis, which can be recursive. Indeed, by later books scientists began to suspect that the "Chtorran biosphere" isn't so much a collection of different species as it is one vast hive-like superorganism, with each species not only fulfilling a niche but laying the groundwork for other more complex forms. Several species of prey animals are in fact suspected to be the juvenile versions of larger predator animals — the few who survive to adulthood metamorphosize and feed on their younger cousins.
What little can be guessed about the Chtorran homeworld is that it must have slightly higher gravity than Earth, and its atmosphere somewhat lower oxygen content—explaining the strength of Chtorran musculature and how efficiently they process oxygen on Earth. Their planet is also suspected to be located near an older red giant star, resulting in most Chtorran creatures possessing a warm color scheme of pink to red. Chtorran organisms use DNA as genetic material: theoretical xenobiologists explain that DNA was already predicted to be the universal basis for alien biospheres, due to its inherent chemical stability. Chtorran DNA even auto-sorts into chromosomes on a basic level, however, its inter-relations are vastly more complex than comparable Terran genetics. Chtorran molecular biology is thus compatible with Earth's, with right-handed DNA and left-handed proteins - if it wasn't, the infestation would have starved to death as soon as it began, unable to digest Terran organisms.
Chtorran life forms seem to thrive best in semi-tropical climate zones, though they are also quite successful in tropical and temperate zones. It is speculated that they may prefer warmer climates, and have only adapted so well to the temperate zones because there are generally more humans to eat there. Whatever the case, six years into the invasion there is not a single region of the planet that does not have at least some small trace of Chtorran life forms in it, even micro-organisms.
Generally, Chtorran life has been slower to spread to desert or polar regions — again, possibly because there is simply less bio-mass to consume in them. Due to its desert climate, Australia is cited as the only inhabited continent in which the infestation has been relatively light. Europe has been only moderately infested, for reasons not entirely clear. Most world militaries were wiped out in the plagues, because governments deployed their soldiers as riot police, allowing them to become infected as well. The only exception was the United States: due to losing a war in the Middle East, international pressure forced it to disarm most of its standing army, the result being that they survived the plagues and were able to be re-mobilized soon afterwards. Thus North America is also one of the few regions that has been able to put up resistance to Chtorran encroachment. Even then, much of the West Coast has been lost, due to Chtorrans breeding unnoticed in the wilderness of the Rocky Mountains until their numbers were overwhelming. The worst infected zones in the United States are in the Rocky Mountains, and in the semi-tropics of the southeastern states : limited nuclear strikes in these states only temporarily culled the infestation, which grew back to prior levels within a matter of months.
Otherwise, vast swaths of South America, Africa, and Asia have been totally overrun. Asia in particular was hard hit by the plagues - with the exception of Japan, which due to its isolated island geography was able to survive relatively intact. Some of the absolute worst and largest Chtorran infestations are in the western United States, India, and the Amazon basin of Brazil — areas which increasingly resemble an alien planet.

Chtorran fauna

Some Chtorran life-forms are similar to plants or fungi, but many are carnivorous plants, or mobile animal-plant hybrids which defy easy categorization.
There are two distinctly different editions of the first two books in this series. The first edition was released in 1983 by Timescape Books. This edition was edited by the publisher and removed several items which they objected to. All of the chapter introductions and several pages of homosexual content were removed. The same thing was done to the 1984 release of A Day for Damnation.
In 1989, David Gerrold made a new publishing contract with Bantam Books. This time, both A Matter for Men and A Day for Damnation were released with all redacted content restored.

Connections to other Gerrold works

Many characters and ideas from other works by David Gerrold have made appearances in this series. Amongst them are H.A.R.L.I.E., tribbles, and the Space Elevator.
The reverse is also true—there are references to the series in other Gerrold novels. In Bouncing Off the Moon, there is a mention of a woman in Oregon claiming that a giant worm ate her horse, along with numerous passages about plagues spreading across the Earth, also suggesting that the two stories take place in the same story universe. References to the series also appear in the Star Wolf novels, such as Chtorrans proper and a self-help guru named Daniel Jeffrey Foreman, suggesting the two series exist in the same universe. In Gerrold's 1977 novel Moonstar Odyssey, there is a reference to "Chtorr-plants" "...named for the legendary place of child-eating demons from which they were supposed to have come" and having an alternate form of photosynthesis. Reference to the Chtorr or Chtorr-like species and situations also pop-up in Gerrold's 1993 book Under the Eye of God and its 1994 sequel A Covenant of Justice. In his Star Trek novel, The Galactic Whirlpool, Gerrold quotes the "Terran philosopher, Solomon Short" as saying, "This neurotic pursuit of sanity is driving us all crazy."

Naming of characters

For Season for Slaughter, Gerrold named several characters after actual people, who donated handsomely to Gerrold's favorite charities for the privilege. Gerrold had not thought to repeat the effort, but as work on Method for Madness progressed, he received so many fan inquiries about "buying a character" that he decided to do it again. Prior to that, In A Rage For Revenge, Gerrold included several characters, particularly children who were fated to be eaten by worms, named after friends he had made when attending his first UK Star Trek conventions.