Into the Storm

I tried this book with some scepticism. There seem to be so many sf novels out there in which Americans, either military or at least armed, boldly go where no man has gone before, and shoot the baddies. To an American, this may seem a very natural kind of book to write or read; but I'm not an American, and it starts to feel a bit samey.Nevertheless, I enjoyed the story well enough; it's competently written and at least different in detail from all the other vaguely similar ones. The situation and the personality of the ship's captain reminded me vaguely of [b:The Ship That Sailed the Time Stream 1258132 The Ship That Sailed the Time Stream G.C. Edmondson https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1328310249s/1258132.jpg 1246947], but the details are certainly different.This is not a time-travel story but an alternative-world story, and rather unusually it's to an alternative world that split from ours a very long time ago, so that evolution has populated the world with a somewhat different set of species. I rather like the lemur-descended creatures who make friends with the marooned humans in their battered old destroyer; although they're not an imaginative fictional creation. They're physically rather short and equipped with fur and tails, but their mentality seems human.The baddies here are the all-devouring merciless lizards, who again seem mentally human, though single-mindedly evil. I suppose it simplifies a story to have baddies that are just bad through and through, but it's unsubtle. In principle I prefer baddies who seem more like normal people.

Alternate universes are always a fascinating prospect. When one looks across the length and breadth of history, the inquiring mind wonders what could have been done differently. A lot of novels explore these possibilities, often altering an event, major or minor, from the past, and then expanding upon the consequences of that one event. For instance, in The Years of Rice and Salt, the author, Kim Stanley Robinson, asks: what would have happened if the plague that ravaged Europe had killed ninety-nine percent of the population, instead of seventy? Based on this one assumption, Robinson weaves a tale exploring almost all (so it seems) of the possibilities arising from the adjustment of that one simple fact, all the way to the twenty-first century.

Some authors, of course, do not reach so far - or they do reach that far, or farther, but choose to narrow the scope of their exploration to something more practical (and which does not require the use of reincarnation as a “time machine,” as Robinson does in The Years of Rice and Salt). This is the case with Taylor Anderson's Destroyermen series, and the first book Into the Storm.

The change appears quite simple, really, but it occurs far back enough in the past that its impact is, frankly speaking, rather incredible. Instead of humans becoming the dominant species on Earth, it is giant lemurs that have done so. There is indeed a species of giant lemur that once existed on Madagascar, but they had already gone totally extinct by the time humanity evolved enough to spread out of Africa. Anderson's "what-if" asks: what if humans had not evolved at all, and remained in the trees? What if it was the giant lemurs of Madagascar that had "descended from the trees," so to speak, and become the dominant species on Earth? An interesting possibility of course, and filled with potential.

But Anderson does not stop there, because instead of Earth having just one dominant race, what if there were two? In Anderson's story, another race has also attained sentience - or at least, sentience enough to develop culture of a sort. These, unlike the giant lemurs, are reptilian - though how that happened I'm not quite so sure. The only way I can imagine this is possible is if this particular race was descended from raptor-type dinosaurs, which were the only conceivable type of reptile that could have produced something intelligent enough to set up a culture. Even then, they do not seem to act very different from their less sentient counterparts, so I do not know if they really do have a "culture" as the word is commonly understood. It may take an anthropologist, or someone more expert with such things than myself, to know what is really going on here.

But this split into two races isn't quite where Anderson begins his tale. Interesting as that might have been, Into the Storm begins elsewhere: in the Pacific, at the beginning of World War II. The Japanese have just swept into the Pacific, and have just chased the Americans out of the Philippines. The destroyer USS Walker, fellow destroyer USS Mahan, and a handful of other, older, outdated ships are among the few that managed to survive the terrible bombings the Japanese did on Philippine ports. In the middle of a heated battle, during which both Walker and Mahan are almost totally destroyed, they slip into a squall - and into someplace else entirely.

Or so they think. For as it turns out, they have not slipped into another place, but into another reality entirely. The squall, as it turns out, is a link between their particular version of reality, and by sailing through it, both Mahan and Walker have found themselves in a parallel universe - and, before very long, caught in another war.

In the novel, it's quite obvious that the main characters are the “destroyermen,” or the men and women aboard the Walker and the Mahan, though mostly those aboard the Walker. Other characters figure in later, but for the most part it is the people aboard the Walker that dominate the story. In particular, the captain, Matthew Reddy, stands out. Although he rather disliked his ship and its crew when he was first assigned to it, he grew to care - and respect - both. He constantly agonizes over his decisions throughout the story, having been traumatized by bad decisions made both as soon as the ships enter the parallel universe, and by those made by his superiors during what he has experienced of World War II. Ranged alongside him are the crew members, and while a few of them stand out, there are also a significant number of them that it is difficult to keep their names straight.

Of course, I also think that most of them are just not memorable enough to stick around in my memory long enough. Aside from the chief nurse, later chief medical officer, Lieutenant Sandra Tucker (who is a very, very tough woman, which is a character type I can always appreciate and remember), Dennis Silva, the gunner's mate (I think), and Kaufman, the (eventually) crazy Air Force captain, I can barely keep all the others straight in my head. I suppose this might be a flaw in their characterization, as I can manage with a large cast of characters just fine, but only if they are of note enough to stick in my memory. There is also a certain unevenness in Anderson's choice of point-of-view character (the novel uses the third-person limited point-of-view) that makes it even more difficult for the reader to truly get to know the characters. If Anderson had just stuck to a handful of select, important characters, it would have been far easier to settle down and like the characters through whose eyes the reader engages with the world.

I also find myself rather leery of the way certain characters are portrayed. While most of the human characters are American (not all of them are Caucasian, but as I mentioned earlier, it's rather difficult to tell them apart since they have not exactly been fully fleshed out), there are two characters who are not: Lieutenant Tamatsu Shinya, and Juan Marcos, the Filipino steward. Shinya plays a larger role than Marcos, but what little I have seen of Marcos rather discomfits me. I refer, in particular to a scene wherein Marcos has to serve Shinya coffee, and Marcos reacts to the task very emotionally. While I suppose extreme emotion in the presence of a person who helped conquer your country might be expected, it is still very early days as of yet into the Japanese Occupation of the Philippines, with many of the horrors (including the Bataan Death March) to come somewhat later. I find Marcos's reaction entirely over-dramatic - and I do not like what this bodes for further characterization of Juan Marcos.Shinya's characterization bothers me somewhat, as well. He is described as a reluctant figher against the Americans, having been educated in the United States and rather liking Americans as a whole, and joining the Japanese Navy mostly out of duty to his family and country. There are times when I rather wish he presented a little more loyalty to his country, that he was portrayed as, well, being more Japanese, if Anderson really wants him to fill in the role of inscrutable Oriental, but it almost feels like Anderson has some difficulty portraying human characters that are not American, and so goes the middle route in Shinya's case - which, unfortunately, only makes his overall character, possibly one of the most interesting so far, feel a bit confusing.

The characters from the other race - specifically the Lemurians - in the parallel universe, however, are far easier to remember, though I suspect this is due to their sheer alien nature than characterization. Or, perhaps, Anderson has spent greater care with the characterization of the non-human characters, expecting the reader to relate more to the humans, thus not really fleshing them out, but putting more effort into the non-human characters so that the reader will be able to relate to them despite their non-human nature. Also, I have to wonder what Anderson knows of lemur behavior, since the Lemurians are supposed to have descended from them, and there is a lot of behavior that strikes me as very appropriate for lemurs, but there is also a lot there that does not seem very lemur-like. Then again, a lot of human behaviors are not very chimp-like or ape-like, so I suppose this divergence is valid.

One other thing that bothers me is this whole “We are Americans, and therefore must do something good for this world” undercurrent that I get right from the very beginning. There is nothing wrong with nationalism, but that same line, used by the old colonial powers, has resulted in much destruction and heartache before. To be fair, Matthew Reddy agonizes over this for a while during the first one-half of the book, but that quickly disappears under something else. I expect this sentiment to surface again sometime later in the series, with greater repercussions than were presented in this novel, but I shall have to wait and see until I read the other books.

Into the Storm is, overall, an entertaining read. It is possible to find shades of Star Trek here, though Reddy is really more a Picard than a Kirk, and the crew of the Walker is much rougher than the crew of any Enterprise I have encountered so far. But there is a sense of exploration here, of going where no man (or woman) has gone before, and if only for that, I found this to be a relatively okay read. There is much that could be improved, I think, and many questions that need answering, but as this is the first book in a series I will have to reserve judgment for the other books down the line.

But Into the Storm has, at least, piqued my interest, and I plan to read the other books in the series to see if they stand up as well as this one - or, hopefully, prove to be better.