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Winner of the 2005 Nebula Award for Best Novel, Camouflage is a gritty new-future thriller that's as lean and as taut as a marathon-runner.
The third gritty near-future thriller to win the Nebula Award for Best Novel in six years, Joe Haldeman's Camouflage is as lean and as taut as a marathon-runner, and one of the best novels of 2005. But it's not perfect. Two alien creatures, very different in outlook yet both quasi-immortal shape-changers, have been roaming the earth for countless millenia. One -- the changeling -- simply wishes to learn whether there are others like it, or whether it is alone. The other -- the chameleon -- wishes to learn whether there are others like it so that it can kill them. For the chameleon is a psychopath. Although it was first serialized in Analog magazine, the absolute bastion of hard science-fiction, the prologue opens with what is some nifty pseudo-science -- but pseudo-science nonetheless -- depicting the origin of the alien species, and how it came to the earth, then settles into twin strands. The first is the story of the finding and excavation of the alien ship, and its subsequent testing on Samoa in 2019. The second tells of the aliens, of the changeling, and it's decision, prompted by no more than a glacially slow curiosity, to cease being a shark and to come ashore and to become human in 1931. As soon as the alien's vessel is identified, both aliens converge on the excavation site, and a deadly game of cat and mouse begins, for one is aware of the other, but not vice versa. The changeling can change it's shape, but not it's mass; to do that, it either has to lose part of its body to become smaller, or to eat something and become larger. By something, Haldeman initially means people. By turns gory and funny, so the alien ploughs through the twentieth century. Haldeman is in no way a sentimentalist, and the alien changeling is truly alien, killing as casually as someone would swat a fly; yet as it gradually learns about human society, so it starts to become the creatures that it mimics, and slowly but surely becomes more human, page by page, year by year. In time, it even learns to fall in love... By contrast, the chameleon cannot change it's shape, but is trapped in a human body, although it can assimilate its victim's features. Neither human nor alien in the same way as the changeling, the second interloper slowly realizes over thousands of years that there may be others like it out there, but it views them as competition, to be eliminated as soon as it identifies them. By associating with Mengele and the Nazis, the chameleon is painted as a black-hatted villain, but in this respect, the chameleon is Camouflage's one true weakness. Killing machines are fine for adolescents, but only of limited appeal to adult readers, and in that respect Camouflage does not truly work. This is a shame, for it almost undoes Haldeman's fine work; Samoa felt as real and as alive as anywhere that's been described in recent years, the main protagonists -- particularly the changeling -- are vividly and sympathetically drawn, and the novel even won the Tiptree award for "science fiction or fantasy that explores and expands the roles of women and men for work by both women and men." The prose is as lean and taut as a marathon runner, and the science well-worked and conveyed so that even lay-people can understand it. A good novel, and almost a great one.
The copyright of the article Camouflage by Joe Haldeman in Alien/Space Fiction is owned by Colin Harvey. Permission to republish Camouflage by Joe Haldeman in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.
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