Tom Kratman: Possibly the Worst Sci-Fi Author I've Ever Seen?

You can tell a lot from the prologue and epilogue of a book. They frame the novel and give the reader perspective. The prologue sets the scene, gives you the perspective necessary to follow the story. The epilogue tells you that the story isn't over, that while this particular part of the journey is over, the next step is already beginning. Together, the beginning and end of a novel are the story in microcosm.

So, with that in mind, let's start this essay of with a visit to Tom Kratman's first novel: A State of Disobedience and, more specific, its prologue. It's an extract from a historical retrospective from 2097, reflecting back upon the events leading up to the novel's story. I'll let it speak for itself:

Yet, despite this mutual interest in maintaining the balance of power, the rewards of attaining control were simply too great to be forgone. For the Democrats, control—could it but be achieved—would make the revolution begun in the 1930s complete. Control of the economy, control of education, control of the environment (difficult to understand now, with the then-common predictions of ecological disaster proven wrong, but a powerful concern at the time); could all three branches be made to fall to the Democracy, however briefly in theory, the Democrats could so arrange matters that no one and nothing could ever remove them from power, or alter their vision of America's proper and just future.

For the Republicans, however, the Democratic dream was a nightmare: thought control through linguistic control, micromanagement of the economy by those least suited to economic power, social engineering under the aegis of the most doctrinaire of the social engineers, disarmament of the population and the creation of a police state to rival that of Stalin or Hitler, at least in its scope if not by design in its evil.

So, in summary, Kratman's first novel opens with the assertion that Democrats want to turn America into a totalitarian, socialist state and Republicans are fighting a rear-guard action to protect the people from this horror. Never let it be said that Mr Kratman isn't direct when he wants to be. This is the perfect summary of everything that is wrong with his books: a constant theme of dark conspiracy at the heart of all things liberal.

Colonel Tom Kratman has been writing military science fiction for Baen Books (link to his page on their website) since late 2003 (the above State of Disobedience). He currently has eight books to his name: A State of Disobedience, Caliphate, his Legion El Cid series (A Desert Called Peace, Carnifex and The Lotus Eaters) and his collaboration with John Ringo in the latter's Legacy of Aldenata series (Watch on the Rhine, Yellow Eyes and The Tuloriad).

First of all, Kratman doesn't really seem to care for actually writing Science Fiction. Most of his novels can best be described as a kind of forward evolution of history. Despite most of them being set in the future, there is a distinct lack of social and technical evolution. If anything, his worlds are regressed, both scientifically and socially.

His major series, the Legion El Cid series, is the worst offender. Set primarily on the planet Terra Nova, it may have to be the least imaginative colony world ever written. According to the background, the colony vessels were split down religious and ethnic lines, thus creating early settlements based upon the Earth's original countries. In truly ridiculous fashion, this means that Terra Nova is a pseudo-Earth, with nations in the identical pattern to Earth. There's a pseudo-US with a pseudo-Mexico on its border, an Islam dominated pseudo-Afghanistan and a pseudo-Iraq. There's a pseudo-EU dominated by the pseudo-France. In Carnifex, there's even a pseudo-Somalia with pirates attacking the shipping passing through the pseudo-Suez Canel. Quite simply, Nova Terra is the least imaginative sci-fi world I've seen. It's got the same political layout as Earth, is at about the same technology level as Earth and it has the same events going on (The War on Terror). The sole part of this world that's vaguely original is its biology, which is primarily made up of animals taken from Earth's prehistory, but that's barely involved in the storyline, aside from being used to make some weak political points.

There are other examples. In Kratman's afterword to Watch On The Rhine, he makes it clear he isn't much interested in the alien technology which dominates the prior Aldenata novels written by Ringo. Yellow Eyes has much the same themes, with the only piece of alien technology to feature heavily in the novel being a rogue AI which is treated more like magic than actual science (in one of its first scenes it melds with the memories of the WW2 ship it is being connected to). The power armour that forms such a central core to Ringo's novels is relegated to the finale of Yellow Eyes.

The most definable element of Kratman's novels is his political opinion. In all of his books, he maintains a constant right-wing slant. Actually, it's probably more accurate to say an extremely right-wing slant. Let's take a few examples. Firstly, State of Disorbedience. Kratman's first novel is about the attempt of a Democrat President to turn the US into a dictatorship. That's nothing major, there's been thousand books of various quality with similar themes. What makes State of Disorder stand out from the pack is its sheer conspiratorial nature. It isn't the President who is trying to take over the country, but the entire Democratic Party, which is acting through the President to take power. It's a measure of Kratman that this is perhaps the least conspiratorial of his novels. Caliphate, for example, features a world where unchecked Muslim immigration and childbirth has produced a Europe where Islamic terrorists rule and Sharia law is paramount.

For the best display of Kratman's strange political beliefs in action, there's really only two things to look at: Watch on the Rhine and the Legion El Cid series. As I said in my review, Watch On The Rhine is a disturbing book, entirely thanks to Kratman's seriously off take on the Nazi's SS. While the original concept is sound (were the SS the monsters they are made out to be or were they honourable soldiers serving an evil regime?), Kratman quickly chucks it out and replaces it with liberal conspiracies to end life on earth and SS hagiography, marked by some profoundly uncomfortable parallels with historical events (the new-SS' involvement in arresting the conspirators is uncomfortably reminiscent of the SS' involvement in the Nazi takeover of Germany). Almost as bad is his Legion El Cid series. Best described as Kratman's view of how he would have fought the War On Terror, the series is dominated by Kratman's favourite conspiracy theory: Transnational Progressivism (which I commented on before). In a nut-shell, Kratman believes that there is a drive inside international liberalism to create a one-world government where a new caste system will be introduced, effectively reducing the world to something comparable to the Party/ non-Party society of twentieth century communism. I'll comment more on Transnational Progressivism later, but it's sufficient for now to say that the theory is seriously off mainstream discourse. It doesn't come as much surprise as you read the books to find the entire left-wing engaged in plotting to betray their own soldiers (the capper has to be the world's media offering material support to pseudo-Al Qaeda).

To be honest, much of Kratman's novels would be significantly improved by something he seems constitutionally incapable of doing: make his villains two-dimensional. Far too many of his books feature central villains far more in keeping with capering panto villains and action movie baddies than actual human beings. President Wilhelmina Rottomeyer from State of Disobedience is probably the best example to start with. In the very first chapter, she's revealed to be a narcissistic, megalomaniac, closet lesbian who derives sexual pleasure from her supporter's cheering. She gets worse. It's quickly revealed she had her running mate assassinated to get more votes and that her FBI head is actively using the organisation to blackmail and control Congress. At one point in Carnifex, he introduces the psuedo-US Secretary of Defence as he's reminiscing about his windsurfing in his campaign adverts (as did Senator John Kerry in the 2004 election) and having him walk in on the psuedo-US President as he's getting a blowjob from an intern (As President Clinton is famous for). It tells you everything you need to know that the psuedo-SecDef is barely phased by this and immediately goes into the business of the day, which is, unsurprisingly, deliberately screwing over the country. You have to admire this scene for its sheer chutzpah if nothing else. Kratman successful hits every dog-whistle about the Democrats in one go: elitist, unfaithful, stupid and determined to destroy their own country.

Disturbingly, his sympathies are often profoundly off. Reading his Legacy of Aldenata books, it's immediately apparent that he has more sympathy for the alien Posleen than he does for the liberal characters. To be clear, these are the aliens who have marched half-way across the galaxy, destroyed hundreds of worlds and devoured trillions of sentient beings. These are the aliens that have almost depopulated the Earth by the end of the story. Yet reading Yellow Eyes and Watch On The Rhine, you can't help but feel that Kratman thinks more of them than he does of his strawman liberals. The entirety of The Tuloriad revolves around the rehabilitation of the Posleen which culminates in their adoption of Catholicism.

The problem extends to the villains' supporters. They're constantly cast as ignorant or brainwashed, existing in a kind of terminally ridiculous world were wishful thinking and blind service replace rational thought. It's just as laughably one-dimensional as his villains. Take Watch on The Rhine for example. The start of the book features several groups of anti-war protestors, seeking peace instead of war with the Posleen. This is of course despite the fact that the Posleen are the alien race that has been invading and destroying every world they touch for several centuries, that they've already invaded the US, destroyed several cities there and have been documented earlier in the novel to be eating human CHILDREN. So yeah. Observation and IQ aren't exactly a 'liberal' tendency, according to Kratman.

In the Legion El Cid novels, the evils of United Earth are clear. It's a decaying socialist aristocracy with a collapsing skillset and a total lack of morality (Sex is the easiest thing to get in the society and The Lotus Eaters reveals that one of the UE's churches is involved in ritual human sacrifice). Most gallingly, fifty-odd years in the pseudo-US' past, the UE nuked several of their cities during the course of pseudo-WW2. Despite this, the left-wing of the pseudo-US are still determined to become like them. It's as if the entire British Labour Party was determined to become like the Soviet Union, despite everything they know about it. His attitude is frankly both insulting and ridiculous, spectacularly puncturing the reader's suspension of disbelief with its sheer idiocy.

I'd probably be willing to cut Kratman a lot more slack if it weren't for the afterwords to his novels. With the exception of State Of Disobedience, all of Kratman's books include a short Op-Ed written by the author where he delves into the genesis of the book and why he feels it relates to the real world. You can find them here: Watch On The Rhine, Yellow Eyes, The Tuloriad, Caliphate, A Desert Called Peace, Carnifex (The Lotus Eaters wasn't release at the time of writing). For the curious, you can read my review of The Tuloriad's afterword here. I find there's just two problems with these little editorials: firstly, there's something profoundly noisome about the conclusions he draws and, secondly, he thinks that the stories he spin have some relevance to the real world.

Let's take the first point first shall we? Kratman can't help but display his profoundly weird and strange views on life and politics. Take, for example, the afterword to Carnifex. In a nutshell, Kratman takes cosmopolitanism, adds a few famous displays of corruption and assume it means that cosmopolitanism is will always produce disaster. It's also a call for nationalism and suspiscion. This kind of attitude is prevalent in all his afterwords. The afterword to A Desert Called Peace, begins by basically calling all liberals insane and then tries to justify it. The afterword basically states that secularism weakens a nation while Christian faith makes it stronger. The inescapable conclusion to this particular nugget is that to be a good soldier is to be Christian. I'm sure there's a few priests out there that would object to such a conclusion.

Most memorable is his constant harping about Transnational Progressivism. It's most prevalent in the afterwords to Yellow Eyes and A Desert Called Peace. Amusingly, after doing some research, I found myself coming to one conclusion: Kratman fundamentally doesn't understand what he's actually talking about. Take a look here. That's an essay I wrote about Transnational Progressivism last month. In a nutshell, it's a concept proposed by John Fonte, that views the behaviour of certain transnational organizations as a prelude for a replacement of democracy with a group-based decision making system. Despite Fonte's evidence being derived from behaviour from the early Noughties, Kratman has somehow managed to interpret this into a global conspiracy from the early years of the Soviet Union. Furthermore, he somehow substitutes Fonte's group-based decision system with a new aristocracy. He's basically taken a fairly unknown political theory and reworked it into a huge conspiracy where the left-wing parties of the world are united in a drive to turn the world into a totalitarian state only nominally socialist.

Anyway, back to the second point. The entire point of Kratman's writing is to present his political positions as the right solution to the world's problems and his afterwords make this very clear. The problem is, if he wants this to work, it needs to be part of the novel, not in an op-ed at the end of the novel. Reading them, you suspect Kratman doesn't really think that his audience can draw the conclusions he wants them to have. Still there's something objectionable about doing this. Books which are a form of advocacy are common (Animal Farm and 1984 are probably the best known examples), but they're often far more subtle than this. With the addition of his afterwords, he's effectively beating his readers over the head with his beliefs. There are also moments when this approach is best described as laughable. This is most noticeable in his novels with John Ringo: Yellow Eyes, Watch On The Rhine and The Tuloriad. Despite all three of these novels beign set either during an invasion, or the aftermath thereof, of the Earth by alien that think humans make a decent meal, Kratman's afterwords suggest that the behaviour within is the best solution to modern day problems. In particular, using the afterword to Yellow Eyes to advocate for the complete revocation of all laws of war baring the 'traditional law of war'. Yes, he takes an alien invasion and uses it to advocate for more barbarous strategies in the here and now.

This leads neatly into the central issue with Kratman's writing: his stories are profoundly unpleasant. They're a mixture of barbaric behaviour mixed with unpleasant displays of weird advocacy. Legion El Cid is perhaps the best example. A Desert Called Peace begins with the main character's wife dying in pseudo-9/11, him then taking revenge by killing a group of ridiculous Muslim caricatures before founding a mercenary army with his wife's money. To ensure he retains the money, he sends some of his allies of to murder his brother in law (who, being gay, is found in the toilets of a gay bar, dishing out free blowjobs). Finally, once he gets into the action (in both pseudo-Afghanistan and psuedo-Iraq) he prosecutes battle in the most brutal manner going. This comes to a head in the battle for pseudo-Fallujah, where, rather than engaging in street-fighting, he instead starves the city into submission and executes every male able to grow a beard. Carnifex is just as bad. Practically the first scene involves the hero's intelligence arm torturing a terrorist leader until he makes a propaganda video for them. The book culminates with another intelligence coup: the nuking of the capital city of the terrorists' main supporters, by the hero. Yes, he kills over a million civilians to make the terrorists look bad. That's grotesque.

No mention of Legion El Cid would be complete without a little more focus on the pseudo-9/11 scene near the start of A Desert Called Peace. Firstly, it's a gut punch of a scene, for all the wrong reasons. The book was first published late 2007 and to be frank it's still too soon. There's something horrible about the re-use of such a raw wound as the start of the series, where almost any other similar act of terror would have done just as well. Making this scene even worse is the ridiculously noble behaviour of the characters involved. The hero's wife, children and father-in-law are all caught near the top of one of the towers with no chance of escape. While the wife proceeds to lead her children in prayer, her father picks up the phone and calls his attorney to put the hero in his will. There's no effort to contact the rest of his children and tell them he loves them, or anything else more important. Instead he has an abrupt epiphany about his previously-disliked son-in-law and proceeds to turn over his entire fortune to him. While facing inevitable death.

There are other elements to his books that make me worry. Firstly, there seems to be a profoundly anti-democratic side to his stories. Whenever a government isn't able to handle the threat in his stories, it is swept away and replaced. A State of Disobedience revolves around multiple American states semi-seceding from the Union until the evil president is assassinating. Yellow Eyes has the corrupt Panamanian government being replaced with an American dictator. The Legion El Cid series contains the most worrying example, with the hero's forces co-opting and effectively absorbing the pseudo-Mexican government until he practically controls the country through the close allies he has in every branch of government (most notably, their version of the Senate is solely open to ex-members of his mercenary force). This tendency towards the replacement of democratic governance when the heroes disagree with it is uncomfortable.

In addition, there's something worrying about Kratman's use of love in his books. With the exception of State of Disobedience, loving someone in his novels seems to be a death sentence. Legion El Cid begins with the death of the hero's wife and children, with the story being driven forwards by his desire for revenge. In both Yellow Eyes and Watch On The Rhine, characters fall in love only for one of the couple to be killed during the course of the novel. I'm not saying that every romance should have a happy ending, but Kratman seems to treat love and loss as cheap sources of motivation for his characters. This would perhaps be more convincing if they did not have more scenes thinking about their loved ones than they do in the same room as them, before their deaths.

Tom Kratman likes to say he writes social commentary with a faint covering of science-fiction. In reality, he explores extremely right-wing conspiracy theories beneath a thin veneer of low-quality science fiction. If he wanted to write social commentary, he'd have to start by including actually sympathetic left-wing characters, instead of going for caricatures that are either actively evil or stupid. Worse, the prejudices he's incapable of hiding actually cheapen his arguments as there's no way you can ever see him as a dispassionate oracle. Instead, in both his stories and afterwords, he comes of as a rabid fearmonger, a crazy crank belonging more on the depths of the internet than the bookshelf.