That’s the end of A Matter For Men.
[spoiler]After spending time learning how to kill the Chtorrans with flamethrowers and then personally investigating a Chtorran burrow himself and surviving, and then capturing a live Chtorran worm, he is “rewarded” by being granted the honor of serving as the protection detail to oversee the Chtorran worm during a display session for visiting dignitaries.
He is given a fletchette gun (shoots steel needles rather than bullets, IIRC) and told not to worry, it’s a formality, the Chtorran is behind superstrong glass and everything is safe. Poor Jim doesn’t know how the guns even work, but he’s no fool. He goes to the target range, checks out ammo, and gets grumbled at for bothering to learn how to shoot the gun.
When the day of the dignitary visit comes, Jim is conscientiously on duty when the magic superstrong glass breaks and the Chtorran worm breaks out of containment and begins eating the dignitaries. Jim singlehandedly takes it down because he learned how to use his gun, but gets injured, because the gun isn’t as effective at stopping them as a flamethrower.
His reward - he’s informed that he was such a pest and troublemaker, they expected him to die in that fiasco. See, they had staged the event to set the Chtorran on the dignitaries to stir up international concern and support that was previously lacking, so they needed to drive home the horror. So they intentionally used weak glass and wanted the worm to slaughter everyone in the room, especially Jim. :smack:
Oh, but now we’ll promote you and really make you part of the team. :rolleyes: [/spoiler]
In that incident with the children,
One of the kids is sexually abused, and so messed up he doesn’t understand emotional connection without it. When this surfaces, Jim is torn up and asks for help in how to deal with it. The doctors suggest he go along with it. Basically, they instruct him to have sex with the kids if that is what they need. Then later, after the bad guys come and make a mess of things, the people in charge take custody of the kids away from Jim, and their justification is he sexually abuses them.
Of course, there is the fact that
the reasons the bad guys came to that location in the first place is that Jim had previously been brainwashed by them and told them about the place and gave them the suggestion.
So it’s not like there isn’t blame to be had.
Yes, the problem is not that Jim is whiney. I mean, he gets upset a lot, and gets lost in introspection and self-pity a lot, but the world he lives in is a fucking mess, there’s an alien ecology taking over the planet and the humans are really pretty helpless in stopping it. Society is a mess, most people are emotional wrecks, blah blah blah.
The problem is that even his friends screw him over. Early on,
he has a buddy and they explore sexuality together. His buddy goes off to telepath school. Later, he runs into his buddy in the form of a woman’s body, via the telepath technology. They hook up for an encounter, which makes sense at the time given their previous relationship, only to find out in the morning that the woman awoke in her own body to find someone had taken it out for a party and left it a mess. Bad enough to come home and find your renters threw a party in your house and didn’t clean up, imagine finding your body trashed. Making Jim a giant ass for being part of that, having to deal with the lady himself because his buddy is off in space again, and by the way the buddy kinda dumped Jim.
And that’s his friend.
But the real problem is, as you say, that the author agrees that it’s Jim’s fault.
