I’ve read A Call to Arms more than once, which for me is the real test of whether a book worked, and it’s held up every time. Book one of The Damned trilogy from Alan Dean Foster has one of those premises that’s so simple you wonder why it took until 1991 for someone to build a whole book around it. The galaxy has been at war for thousands of years, the good guys are losing, and the reason they’re losing is that none of them are any good at violence. Then they find us, a noisy little planet full of people who’ve been practising on each other for as long as there’s been anyone to practise on. And it turns out we’re very, very good at it, which is great news for the war and terrible news for everybody’s sense of who they’ve just let in the door.
The aliens are horrified by us, and they need us anyway
The Weave is an alliance of species who find killing close to unthinkable, so the war they’ve been fighting against the Amplitur is more about manoeuvring and holding ground than actually winning anything. The Amplitur want every thinking species folded into their great Purpose, and they’re happy to get there by persuasion or by quietly reaching into your head. So the Weave are slowly losing, one world at a time, and a scout ship that wanders out to Earth finds a species that not only fights but seems to enjoy it a bit too much. What I love is how much of the book is just the aliens looking at us and being appalled. Our history, our sports, our entertainment, the way we talk about winning. Everything they find disgusting about us is also the only thing that can save them, and they know it, and they hate that they know it. There’s a running thread where they try to study us politely, the way you’d study a dangerous animal you need to borrow for a bit, and every time they think they’ve worked out where our limits are, some other human turns up and blows straight past them.
This is the bit that kept pulling me back for rereads. It’s humanity seen from outside with all the stuff we’re a bit embarrassed about turned into the one thing worth exporting, and it’s played with a lot of humour rather than as a lecture. I kept thinking of it as the opposite of the usual first contact story where the wise old aliens come down to teach us how to be better. Here the wise old aliens are in real trouble and they’ve come to hire the barbarians. It’s the same itch Live Free or Die scratches decades later, humans as the scrappy species nobody in the neighbourhood rated, except this one flips it so the aliens are the ones who look soft and we’re the ones who look dangerous.
Is this where the “humans are space orcs” stories started?
If you’ve spent any time online you’ve probably seen those little stories that go around about humans being the space orcs of the galaxy. The ones where aliens are terrified of us because we pet anything with teeth, survive things that should kill us and treat war as a thing you can just get good at. A Call to Arms feels like a prequel to all of that, written decades before anyone was posting it, and honestly I’d be surprised if a few of those writers hadn’t read it. Humanity is the absolute antithesis of a peaceful galactic society in this book. We’re not evil, we’re just built differently, and the Weave can’t decide whether that makes us the cavalry or the next problem. It’s the same question Starship Troopers asks about what a society owes the people it sends to fight, only asked by a bunch of aliens wincing at us.
What makes it more than a fun premise is that the book doesn’t let anyone off the hook. The Weave want our violence but they don’t want us, not really, not at their table. And the Amplitur look at the same planet and see exactly the same opportunity, so before long Earth is a target, because whoever gets humanity on side probably wins the war. That attack, and what happens when the Amplitur try their mental “suggestion” on human minds and it just doesn’t take, is where the book clicks up a gear for me. Finding out that the one species the Weave were nervous about is also the only one the enemy can’t control changes the whole balance of the war, and it sets up everything the next two books do with that idea. It’s a cool turn, the kind of thing that made me put the book down for a second and go “oh, that’s going to matter later”, and it’s paid for properly, with the Weave suddenly realising they might need us even more than they feared.
Will Dulac spends half the book arguing with himself
Will Dulac is the human the Weave approach first, a Cajun songwriter from around New Orleans who doesn’t want anything to do with anyone’s war, and he spends a good chunk of the book trying to convince the aliens that humans are basically peaceful. He believes it, too. Which is a bit of a problem when every other human the Weave contact signs up to fight pretty much immediately and makes him look ridiculous. Some people find him hard work, and I can see why, he’s arrogant and he’s stubbornly wrong for a long stretch, but that’s sort of the point of him for me. He’s the human who wants to be the species the Weave hoped for, and the book keeps showing him that he isn’t.
And I liked that tension more than I expected to. Caldaq, the alien who first reaches out to him, is a nice counterweight, someone polite and alien and genuinely uncomfortable with what they’re asking for. The conversations between the two of them are where a lot of the book’s best stuff happens, Dulac getting defensive, Caldaq trying very hard to be diplomatic about how frightening we are, neither of them ever quite winning the point, because it’s two people from completely different ideas of what normal is trying to work out whether either of them is the monster. There’s a lot of talk in this book. If you want nonstop space battles, wall to wall lasers and boarding actions from the first chapter, it’s going to frustrate you, because the fighting is not really what it’s about. For me the talk is the fun part, and it’s a big reason I’ve happily come back to it. Every reread I notice a different little joke at our expense, some throwaway line about how a human would handle a problem that makes an alien quietly need to sit down, and it still makes me grin.
The ending is the bit I keep coming back for
I liked almost everything about A Call to Arms, and that includes the ending, which some people seem to find abrupt. After all his arguing, after spending the book insisting humanity isn’t what the Weave think it is, Dulac ends up embracing exactly that. He fights. Not because he’s been tricked or pressured into it, but because he finally gets that this is what he’s for, and that the thing he was ashamed of in his own species is also something he’s got in him. It’s a great turn for a character who’s been so stubborn, and it doesn’t play as him giving up on his ideals so much as finally being honest about them, and it lands because the whole book has been building to the moment he stops arguing and just accepts who he is.
It also means the book doesn’t really close the story so much as hand it over. You finish A Call to Arms with humanity committed to the war, the Amplitur knowing exactly what they’re up against, and the Weave stuck with an ally they still don’t fully trust. Which is a good place to leave things when there are two more books coming, and it left me wanting the next one straight away. I didn’t mind that it stops rather than wraps up, either, because the last thing I wanted was for the book to explain away what Dulac just did.
4 out of 5, and highly recommended. It’s the one I’d lend out first, and I’d probably want it back.