Is there any indication that David Gerrold will ever publish another War Against the Chtorr novel? There are supposedly three more to go. The last comments on his website appear to date back to 2011 and I think there were several “publication is imminent” announcements some years before that.
Probably not great literature, but I liked the books back in high school, twenty years ago. It’s a fun mix of weird alien ecology, post apocalyptic society, pop psychology, and military sci-fi. Plus machine telepathy and a cameo appearance by tribbles. The best part is that we (the Earth’s entire biosphere) are slowly and inevitably losing to an opponent that is still largely unknown.
The last I heard - and I have no link or source or proof - is that Gerrold got in a fight with his publisher, and didn’t want to work with them ever again, but they hold the right to first print/refusal on the Chtorr books. So the answer is, we will never get another book, never get the end of the series.
I’m Facebook friends with him (no, he doesn’t know me from Adam’s cat–I think I got in because we have a lot of friends in common, and stayed because I haven’t done anything to piss him off yet. :P) and occasionally he mentions that he’s working on it. I don’t know if he’s kidding, though. If what Irishman says is true, he probably is.
I pre-ordered A Method For Madness on amazon back in 2010 for publication & delivery in June. That kept getting pushed back a few months at a time for more than 2 years before amazon finally pulled it.
And then I heard the same story that Irishman related.
I doubt we’ll ever see it. It’s a shame- despite the series’ tendency to preach, the world itself is interesting as hell.
I’ve given up on Gerrold. The author enters into a sort of contract with the reader- if he agrees to give us a full story, we agree to read it. Well, we agreed to read it… but he’s fallen through on his part of the bargain. He’s left us hanging for two decades(!).
Just looking at Gerrold’s website. He has a section about the Chtorr series which is still active (it’s been updated this year).
He says he’s still working on the next book (Volume 5: A Method For Madness). But he says he’s hoping to complete it in 2011 so obviously that prediction is out of date.
He makes no mention of any difficulty with a publisher. He plays it cagey but he seems to be saying the book he has not finished writing the book yet. So it’s not like the completed manuscript exists and its publication is just be held up by legal arguments. He implies he’s just doing a lot of revising and rewriting to improve the book.
On the plus side, Gerrold is still writing. He’s published nine other novels since the last Chtorr book was released. So it doesn’t appear he’s succumbed to writer’s block.
Yeah, the books could be preachy and the protagonist a whiney bitch. I was still interested at the time. That was when I was in college 20 years ago.
Like I said, I have no actual evidence or substance to the rumor other than the thorough lack of completion of the book for the past 2 decades, despite him being “almost finished” since at least 1995.
I would be happy to be proven wrong, except a book coming out this late is either going to be (a)awesome because he really found the time to work out all the kinks and polish up the best product possible, or (b) lackluster and unfulfilling because he couldn’t string together his ideas well enough to make a product he liked until he finally just gave up and published something to call it done.
Plus the fact that I’m in a different headspace, so I’d have to go reread the whole series and see how that puts me. Which I would do if there were actually a new book coming out, but I can’t quite get myself to spend the time for no payout. I have actually read them more than once.
I am not the same guy now as I was 20 years ago. I assume most people experience change in themselves as well.
Writing is a creative process (much like making music is), and I assume that anything written by any author after they have experienced 20 more years of life is going to have a ( even if only slightly) different “feel” or “tone” to it.
I would hope so, because I was getting very annoyed with the series by the time it hit the pause button. The the initial premise was great, but the Gerrold took it in a direction I really disliked. So I haven’t been the least bit upset by the lack of finish. YMMV.
(bolding mine)
Mr. Gerrold said a few years back that the novel was extremely difficult to write since it’s all told 1st person and the protagonist has gone insane. Also, caring for his son takes up a lot of his time; I read another interview (back in the mid -00s) where he cited this priority as a factor in the completion of AMFM.
I recently (back when Amazon was listing the next book as coming soon) reread the series and the problem is NOT that the protagonist is a whiney bitch, when you read the series as a whole. The problems are
The author thinks the protagonist is a whiney bitch
The protag. is never given clear directions, clear instructions or clear information…and sometimes the info/directions he gets are outright lies…but is forced into situations where he has to act despite that.
Everyone around him, including his girlfriend, then gets pissed when he acts on the lack of information/instructions in a way they didn’t like and says he’s a whiny bitch*. On reread this was super-frustrating. Jim almost always acts correctly on the information/directions his superiors give him and he always gets accused of being whiny and doing it wrong when their original directions were wildly unclear or incomplete or just lies.
If this is Gerrold’s point–that Jim needs to kill all his superior officers because he’s the only sane one, that’s cool. But I got really, REALLY tired of everyone blaming Jim for their own incompetence.
I didn’t feel this way when I read the books as they were coming out, but rereading them fairly recently in a huge lump, I got super sick of everyone blaming Jim for their inability to tell him what they want.
Also, I hope if he doesn’t finish it, he’ll at least tell us where the invasion is coming from. I had a theory back in the '90s that I no longer remember the reasons behind, that the Cthorr invasion is actually our far-future ecology coming back in time and invading us in the present.
*By way of analogy:
Everyone: Jim, go bake something!
Jim: Bake…what? A chicken? A loaf of bread? Be more specific!
Person 1: Baking is a process. Go do the process without questioning the process
Person 2: In a post-Cthorr world, any baking is a victory! Go make your own victory.
Person 3: For eating. You need to bake something for us to eat.
Person 4: Grain–what you bake needs to involve flour.
< Jim goes away, comes back 2 hrs later with an elaborate cake >
Everyone: Jim you moron! That’s not what we wanted! We wanted you to go use a flamethrower on a Cthorran worm and see if the worm-meat can be fed to cows as food.
Jim: But…but…you didn’t say anything like that. And what about the “it’s gotta contain grain/flour” thing? Or the “It’s for us to eat” thing?
Person 4: That’s a level 23 code for kill a worm
Jim: But you know I’m only level 12.
Everyone: Jim, stop being a whiny bitch.
Jim: Fuck you all.
Everyone: Jim, you’re being a douchebag for not figuring out what we should have asked you and doing what we might have meant rather than what we said, and now you’re throwing a tantrum because we called you on it.
Let’s go to the quarry and throw stuff down there! That was hilarious! We should get you together with tracer and you two could do a Weber/Gerrold collaboration story!
ETA: Too long; Didn’t quote
I agree with every bit of that. Jim stumbled into a situation through a clerical error that put him face-first with battling Chtorrans, and every step since then he has been mislead, jerked around, given incomplete or false information, used for any number of ulterior motives and hidden agendas, and generally screwed over. And then everyone shits on him for not playing by their rules.
Having reread the first 2 books last year (after decades passing since I first read them), they were shockingly (to me) very different from how I remembered them. It was mostly the story of Jim continually getting the short end of the stick, set against the background of the alien invasion. I’d remembered it as much more invasion, much less introspection and social commentary from the author.
I think now I would like to read about the Chtorr invasion as written by someone else, with emphasis on really digging into the alien-ness of the encroachment. IMO, Gerrold took a good idea and gave us the wrong version/viewpoint.
On another recent re-read, The Man Who Folded Himself wasn’t as good as I remembered it, either.
“…Jim continually getting the short end of the stick, generally succeeding despite that and then getting yelled at for winning.”
There’s one scene…I think it’s in the second or third book but since I read them in one big lump, it’s hard to remember where one stops…where Jim and his team are sent on some mission or other. Jim decides to test the new equipment before the mission and learns how to turn the science-fiction-version of a safety off. Because he was smart enough to practice in advance he survives the mission. When he returns, he’s met with people saying (essentially) “You dumb fuck. That was a suicide mission. We intended for you to die. What the fuck is wrong with you? Can’t you do anything right?”
In another one, Jim is staying in an orphanage, protecting the little kids. He’s given no training on how to care for horribly psychologically scarred children. He’s told that he’s just as broken as those kids and the only reason they let him stay is they like Jim’s mom and would he please get off his ass and do something? He asks “What?” and they say “Do SOMETHING”. Jim tries to convince them to build some defenses, and he decides that one of the ways he’ll help the kids is to let them actually talk about what traumatized them. And teach them it’s ok to be scared and angry about it. (Which is certainly a not-unreasonable thing to guess on how to help these kids, given the complete lack of any other information)
He’s mocked for wanting to build fences/defenses and thoroughly berated for trying to help the kids in the best way he knows how…remember–they point-blank refused to give him any instruction on “good” ways to help them.
Then, when the worms come and kill most of the kids, he’s berated again for being angry that nobody listened to him.
I don’t object to Jim being shit-upon. That’s what happens to protagonists*. And I don’t mind so much that everyone berates him. This is fine. Jim is in a world where everyone is the worst possible asshole. The problem seems to be that the author agrees with everyone else about Jim. The problem is that since the author seems to agree with everyone (based on Lizard’s comments as well as Uncle Ira and a few other “good” characters) that Jim is an whiny bitch with anger management issues (despite the evidence to the contrary), we’ll never get an ephiphany where Jim stands up and says “Fuck you all–I don’t have a problem, you do!” to everyone.
*Unless you’re in a Spider Robinson story, in which case, author-fiat will magically make everything all betters for you so the reader can feel all warm and cuddly regardless of what it does to the actual story.
