Mercurio D Rivera, ‘Wergen: The Alien Love War’ (2021)

 

Shortlisted for the 2022 Clarke award, Mercurio D Rivera’s Wergen: The Alien Love War (NewCon 2021) is a fix-up novel: seven previously published short stories, plus five unpublished shorts, laying out the story of humanity's encounter with the alien ‘Wergen’ from roughly AD 2500 to 2600. The wrinkle here is an inversion of the conceit of Tiptree’s ‘And I Awoke and Found Me Here On The Cold Hill's Side’ (1972). In that story (a great story it is too) humans are enthralled by, sexually obsessed with, an alien life form called the Sellice. In Riviera’s fix-up it’s the aliens, the mild-mannered, civilised, technologically-advanced Wergen, who are hopelessly in love with humanity. They can’t help themselves. To them we are wonderful, adorable, no matter how ugly we may be physically or morally, no matter how badly we treat them. Wergen devotion to humanity leads to them sharing their interstellar tech with us, collaborating with us in planetary colonisation and above all serving us, de facto slaves. We abuse and demean them; they love us and serve us.

It's a solid piece of SF, this novel: readable, engaging, thought-provoking. It is, let me assure you, considerably better than its ‘Olsen Twins Meet Eric Cantona’ cover-art, at the head of this post—truly, some of the worst cover-art in the long and glorious history of sciencefictional cover art. The novel behind the cover is a servicable thought-experiment—what if E.T. were helplessly in love with us?—to which it adds the correlative: the ways we would likely act thereafter would not reflect creditably upon us.

Each chapter here functions as a standalone as well as a unit in the larger story, though as with many collections of short stories the units are of varying quality. One problem is that Rivera’s core conceit—a good one—fits a short-story setting, and gets stretched too thinly when extended over 300 pages. In order to keep the story going he has to throw into the mix, first, an anti-love drug for Wergens, to cancel the effects of his premise; then a pro-love drug that mimics Wergenlove among humankind, and finally an anti-anti-love drug to counter the effects of the first drug’s countering. These move the plot along, but at the cost of trivialising love as such, instrumentalising it, and so diminishing the novel. They are, frankly, gimmicks, pushing the characters and populations of the story around like counters on a board.

The ‘anti-love drug’ is breathed-in from a blue inhaler device and gives the individual Wergen, even if only for a few minutes, an unclouded view of unlovely humanity. Under its influence some Wergens begin a terrorist campaign against their human enslavers, and events snowball until humans and the Wergen are at war. The aliens' huge technological advantages ought to make conflict a short-lived affair, but quite a few of them are still besotted with us, so battle is more equal. Besides, an ancient galactic race far advanced even beyond the Wergen, called the Eremites, offers far greater prospects in alliance. Asia and Europe get blasted, but what the hey. Then the Eremites mysteriously withdraw and without their super-duper tech, and unable to maintain the super-tech the Wergen had previously gifted humanity, things look grim for homo sapiens.

The Wergen have three-ply DNA. They mate by linking male-and-female via a cranial umbilicus whereupon the ‘dominant’ party absorbs the other into their body and so generates babies. They lack what a human might recognise as a brain (we’re told ‘Wergen physiology has no analogue to the human brain, all neural activity is centred in a swath of cells that surround their upper and lower jawbones’). Nonetheless they possess, improbably enough, intensely human sensibilities and attitudes. They read like Star Trek aliens: people in prosthetics and fancy dress. The novel does wave its hand a little by way of explaining this—it seems the Wergen modify their physiology to more resemble whichever alien species they encounter—but it still strains credulity. (Matters aren't helped when the book forgets itself, as when it describes the ‘nasal twangs’ of the Wergen speech [13], even though the Wergen lack noses). Then again, perhaps this doesn’t matter. Rivera is writing aliens in order to metaphorize human concerns. That’s fine, SF does that all the time. My problem I think is the narrowness with which the conceit is developed.

It's a premise that would enable a writer to speculate and explore the parameters of love as such—one of the greatest themes in literature, of course But Rivera follows-through on it in rigidly materialist, instrumentalist terms: the Wergen’s ‘love’ for humanity is merely a matter of brain chemistry, easily reversed with drugs. When human scientists develop their artificial love-drug, the ‘neuromone’, which compels humans to love other humans the way Wergen love humans, it's a development with all the shonky contrivence of the ‘love philtre’ device of old romances. Of course, writing in the cynical, bitter 2020s it’s no surprise how Rivera’s spins this in-story development: a worthless elite (the ‘Charismatics’) reserve use of this drug to themselves and enjoy the perks that go along with being adored by the multitudes: a 0.01% governing elite, holders of all the wealth and privilege. The impoverished billions have no choice but to love the Charismatics and so collude in their own oppression. There is satirical potential in this notion, but the novel doesn’t really follow-through on it. 

Much of the problem, I think, is that ‘love’ is this novel is rendered with soap-opera flatness and melodrama: ‘A familiar tenderness flashed across her eyes, but only for a second. “It’s over, Max. It’s been over for a long time now. You just didn’t know it.” … If what she said was true, if what we shared had died a long time ago, why did her words cut so deep?’ Mills: meet Boon.

Actually, that's not fair to Mills & Boon, many of whose books capture something vital and true about the way love works in the world. Love in this novel is entirely stimulus-response, wholly linear and wholly material, and thus completely in thrall to imagined technology, drugs that can either compel you to love somebody, or else can compel you not to love somebody. It's all teenage-crush intensities of joy and grief:

Adrian and I lean over the edge of the rooftop. I move closer to him and he turns to face me ... After so many years of secretly pining for him, I take a deep breath. I can imagine leaning in, kissing him softly on his lips. I'm staring deeply into his blue eyes. [135]

“What’s wrong with you? I’m not some lab specimen! I’m a person!” I’m shouting at the top of my lungs, my fists clenched. “I’m just trying to get through school, to live my life.” I turn and stomp away but then whirl around. “Why are you doing this to me?” [155]

Clunk, goes the prose. Clank, goes the characterisation. This is not a novel that captures the complexities and ironies of love, and for all its sub-Baxterian galactic ranging-around, there's little depth here. Then again, this book has just been shortlisted for the UK’s premier SF award. A surprising inclusion, really.