The clarity and terror of the vision is incredible (The Death Guard - Phillip Chadwick)

Member Name: jdkane

Product:	The Death Guard - Phillip Chadwick
Date:	19/03/01 (48 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Scene- setting; terrifying clarity of vision of near- doom with entirely believable politics and psychonomy; A

Disadvantages: Characterisation; a little facile and extreme particularly in those we are not supposed to like, but sound enough; B-

Lord knows where I managed to get this from; it is long out of print. Melodramatic title, maybe, but my god, what happens justifies it.

It was the only science fiction novel of a man named Phillip Chadwick, was written on the eve of the second world war, and promptly, for reasons of civilian morale, banned. It is actually quite easy to understand why.

Immediately after the first world war, a biologist has an idea. He served in the trenches, and sees no reason why anyone should ever be put through the horrors of the front line again. There has to be an alternative. There must be some way to rearrange war to reduce or remove the human burden of it. In all the novels and articles of artificial life, I do not think it has ever been spelled out quite so clearly why it might turn out that way- why a civilised, intelligent man might work for it to become so. The clarity and terror of the vision is incredible and could only have been written in such circumstances. It becomes impossible to work on in the controlled circumstances of interwar England- far too much danger of terrifying the neighbours- so they move to Africa. Remember, this was written in colonial days, so is a little raw in its treatment of relations between the races- although I am sure Chadwick disapproves, in order to draw local labour the experimenters resort to a highly racist cult of white greatness. He could, I suppose, have made a counterpoint between black constancy and hard work and white professional slime, and in fact at the very end of the book he does. There in Africa they develop an artificial life form, slowly, painstakingly, and gruesomely. The result has no mind as such, and no musculature and central nervous system. It is a kind of mobile mass of cartilage, that can take bullet hits with no more chance of death than if it were a tree, that sees in the infra-red with no visible eyes, that cannot engage in ranged combat but uses something very like a pike, called a quadrifan
e, at close quarters.

The slow nervous escalation to open conflict through fear is masterful. It did not happen like this, and could not, but it very nearly did. Increasing military tension leads to increased trigger happiness, and soon there is full scale war. This is the part that it was banned for more than anything else. The portrayal of the devastation that would result from a preemptive invasion, using all the horrors of modern war- well, our navy and air force are wiped out and half the country rendered uninhabitable through gas and blast- and neoblasty, when the material of which the Death Guard are made does not quite lie down and die when killed. ~The counterstrike threaten to force the continental enemy to damage himself quite as badly. Despite the times, this is not a preachy book- at least it does so from very graphic illustration- that rather than trying to make war more viable, we should try to make war no more.

Imagination; less than the guts it took to write like this; B
Science; very much neo- near world of the time, chosen to make a point, but well experienced; B=
Scene- setting; terrifying clarity of vision of near- doom with entirely believable politics and psychonomy; A
Characterisation; a little facile and extreme particularly in those we are not supposed to like, but sound enough; B-

Overall; definitely an underground classic; A-

Summary: