CAMOUFLAGE ambushes the pack

posted by Todd T @ 5:35 PM

I see that Joe Haldeman's novel CAMOUFLAGE has won the Nebula. I was surprised. I haven't read the other nominees, but CAMOUFLAGE is not what I think of when I think of Nebula work.

I like Haldeman's work, and I liked this book too, really, for what it is. But it does not seem to me to be the pinnacle of the sf writing craft.

It's a near future thriller, pretty well done and certainly entertaining. Two plot threads alternate at first. In one, a creature that has lived in the ocean for millennia, mimicking various species, but cannot remember how it came to be there, comes ashore and stumbles on a human, and by accident and cleverness begins nearly a century of learning about humans and science in an effort to find out if there are others like it. It can change shape given a bit of time, and also size by consuming or dropping mass. As it studies humans, it gains in skill in passing as human, though it needs none of the same resources to be essentially immortal. Just about all of its adventures are fascinating and well thought out. The other thread: a former admiral hires an oceanography company to work on a secret project to recover and study an apparently alien artifact sunk deep in a Pacific trench. This plot is much more routine for the most part - could be straight out of Crichton. Perhaps you will guess that these plots converge eventually.

The writing is good. Haldeman is a fine craftsman. He was shooting for thriller, and he hit the mark. I was always drawn on to see what happened next. But on the way, one finds Haldeman leaving some gaps unsealed, some potholes raced past and not filled. One must accept right off the bat that all the key players will jump in with both feet on a crazy sounding plan. The artifact reveals immediately that it has a perfect mirror surface – does it make sense then to test it at length with ever more powerful lasers? And why let these tremendously powerful lasers bounce up and into the air where they could hit a helicopter full of reporters and other snoops, which we are told are all over the place? No matter, the plot barrels forward. The climactic scene is tense but far too brief and not visually clear enough to be spectacular. The big problem for me, though, is that much of the behavior of two major characters in the latter parts of the book, critical to the plot, simply struck a clanging false note. Impossible to discuss without spoilers, so details are put farther below. Superb writing could force me to believe it, but although there’s plenty of convincing characterization here, I just never did buy the buildup to the climax, nor thus the climax itself. Not a disaster, given the fun along the way, but if we're judging for the ultimate trophy of writerly accomplishment in sf, points must be deducted, I'd think.

So, a Nebula? Not if I were king. Fun? Sure. Maybe Haldeman's sixth or seventh best novel. But I can't really believe that this was the novel most revered by other sf writers in 2005.

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After a series of shocking events, some quite intimately personal, it seems to me that Russ is far too slow to grow cautious, far too reliant on a single piece of evidence that convinces him that everything is normal in the face of lots of evidence that just about anything could be way weird. His world should be rocked to the foundation. A still bigger flaw is that I just never believed that the alien could love the human. Haldeman after all has done an excellent job imparting to us just how alien it is, and it should be too alien to form an emotional attachment, though we are told mimicking humans so long is rubbing off on it – but how? Is he going all Sturgeon on us in the last 20 pages? Don't forget that the alien itself has had a number of big revelations - isn't it too distracted by those to think about how to include a human in its life?