The Chaplain’s War by Brad R. Torgersen

Harrison Barlow was a chaplain’s assistant in the first of humanity’s wars against a technologically advanced conqueror race. Harrison and thousands of other soldiers were rounded up by the insect-like enemy, who humans call the mantis race (mantes is the plural) and held in a prison camp on a planet called Purgatory. Harrison, carrying out a promise to the chaplain who died, built a chapel that was open to everyone. That action intrigued the scholar class of the mantes and led to a cease-fire. As The Chaplain’s War, Brad Torgersen’s novel based on his original novella, progresses, that cease-fire breaks down. The book questions whether humans and mantes can ever co-exist.

There was a lot to like in this book, and there were definite weaknesses that affected my enjoyment. Ultimately, Harrison, the likeable main character, kept me reading, ... Read More

It was a treat to reread Geoff Ryman’s “What We Found” to prepare to write this column. As I noted when I wrote about this story for my review on the issue of F&SF in which it originally appeared, Ryman has been writing in recent years of third-world cultures, in such a way that the reader becomes immersed in the culture, surrounded by sights, scents, tastes and sounds of a world so foreign to a first-worlder that it might as well be an alien civilization. This time, the setting is Makurdi in central Nigeria, a city with air conditioning, solar panels, smartphones -- and roosters crowing outside the window on the morning of the narrator’s wedding day. As Patrick tells his story of his strange scientific find... Read More