- Cat Mattress
- Jul 14, 2012
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by Cyrano4747
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According to a random web search result:
quote:A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.
- G.K. Chesterton
Why am I writing about the Salvation War, one of the more stupid and obscure pieces of fiction found in the collective unintelligence of the Internet? For large part, the reason is that I was once a person who liked it. Yes, I found it on Stardestroyer.net, when I was younger. It spoke to my biases, as it did to most of the community’s, and for quite a time its writer, Stuart Slade, was a board celebrity. Then there was a controversy, the details of which I wasn’t there for, Stuart vanished to reign as king over his own tribe of fascists and reactionary loons, and the full ugliness of his world-view was suddenly laid bare to me and all the others.
The Salvation War has the premise that God has abandoned Earth, leaving it to Satan, which causes humanity to declare war on Heaven and Hell. This might have ended up as a good story, except that the only similarity God and Satan have with the Bible are their names. This still might have been good, if not for the fact that Slade is completely incapable of introducing actual drama or struggle into anything he writes.
His mindless disciples defend this and another prominent error in Stuart’s writing by saying that the series is intended as some sort of historical account – but no historical account gives the internal thoughts of soldiers who died in battle, or the exact words spoken at meetings that took place in a now-destroyed building, both of which occur in the Salvation War.
I’ll start with the first ‘novel’ in the series, Armageddon???, then the second, Pantheocide (the title of which is a blatant lie). There never was a third book, for which I am thankful. This review is, unfortunately, largely written from what I remember of the story, which might be inaccurate on some details.
The Salvation War: Book 1
The Salvation War starts off incredibly bad, and gets worse from thereon. The first words are Satan’s – Lucifer has apparently been taking lessons in elocution from 1960’s comic book villains – followed by the immortal abjuration ‘Balls’. Then some demons show up and get killed messily, mostly by their own blood (yes – demon blood is apparently composed of ‘fire and acid’, as the author never considered that self-cremation from a paper cut is not an evolutionary viable trait. His grasp of science is truly wonderful). Some other demons show up, all having completely pathetic weaknesses, totally contrived to allow humans to destroy them with pathetic ease.
Then it gets...odd. See, the demons know who Bill Clinton is, and that the country where he lives is a world power, but they don’t have any idea of modern technology because they last studied Earth in the seventeen-hundreds or thereabouts (yes, the author actually wrote this without grasping how neither of them makes sense with respect to the other). They send a succubus to him, who dies. Now, this succubus apparently has the ability to teleport and shift shape, but that would make them an actual threat, which Stuart is incapable of writing. So succubi, and the other demons, get the power to control minds and perceptions instead...but this great power, which could make humanity’s war less trivial than a world champion wrestler fighting, a blind, deaf, paralysed midget, is blocked...by aluminium foil. Yes, what works for the mind control rays of the New World Order also works for demonic telepathy! What a brilliant coincidence!
So the demons attack with an army...not anywhere near a vulnerable area like, say, New York City, but on the other side of the world, in Iraq, where there just happens to be a US occupation force (the book was written, and is set, in 2008). Isn’t it wonderful when the author blatantly plays favourites? So the demons attack, and get defeated after killing some people.
Meanwhile, the Randi Foundation has been searching for psychics. Never mind how this is a fundamental error in James Randi’s character (say, on the same level as making that woman straight, German-American and Protestant), this showcases another problem of Stuart’s, and his greatest failing – the inability to actually create a coherent plot. Seriously, in every book of his we zoom semi-randomly from one of the dozens of subplots to vignettes and characters we never get to see again, followed by a return to what passes for a main plot. A novel may be superlative in all other aspects, but if it cannot create a coherent plot it, generally speaking, has failed.
So we end up in Hell, where one of the casualties of the battle in Iraq has escaped from her torture after being gratuitously raped by various demons. This is another problem of the story – if you die in it, you can be guaranteed to respawn in Hell like a video game character, be tortured horribly –suffering no long-term ramifications, like psychological issues from, I don’t know, being bathed in lava for thousands of years (this is actually what a character goes through before being rescued) – and then escape/be rescued with no trouble.
Anyway, said woman eventually ends up having sex with Julius Caesar and ruling large areas of Hell, so it’s not all bad for her. After Sheffield and Detroit are destroyed by demon weaponry which, oddly enough, they didn’t use on Washington D.C., the capital of one of their foremost enemies, humans invade Hell, which has different geometry and physics (not different enough to even cause difficulty to the attack, however). Satan’s palace gets blown up, and the demon army sent to block the human advance is destroyed. Then Satan gets an anti-ship missile to the chest, the demon lava-attacks are stopped, and the stage is set for the stupid to be magnified and expanded in the next book, where we learn that the Angel of Death’s ‘I-kill-your-soul’ powers are easily resisted by household pets, the Archangel Michael is a two-bit Godfather wannabe, and that the environment of Heaven is every bit as boring as the book itself.
Book 2
The second book is far worse than the first, so I won’t give a synopsis. Instead I will comment on the generalities and some specifics.
First off, there’s Uriel. As the angel of death, one might expect him to be more capable than the others. This is untrue. His ability to annihilate souls is resisted by household pets, and whenever he attacks the chief concern is that he’ll get tired and have to run off. This is not a level of capability you give the main antagonist of your story’s first half. Uriel gets less capable with each appearance, where an actual author would try and ramp up the threat he poses.
Early in the book we are told that humanity was almost defeated in the events of the first book for want of ammunition. This is perfectly emblematic of the author’s inability to write worth a drat, as if the endless walls of bad text weren’t enough. For one, in the first book there is no indication that this is the case. Second, we are told about this after the fact. Thirdly, this lack of ammunition is never brought up again.
Then Heaven attacks, only its assaults are at best nuisances to the human war effort. Seriously, we could have got firestorms stretching over continents, meteorite strikes causing massive tidal waves, radioactively-contaminated rivers, and horribly lethal and tormenting bio-weapons even if the author wanted to make it look scientific. Instead Michael had to steal human tech to pull off his larger attacks. Then he launches a coup against Jehovah, who is defeated by the theme to The Dambusters. Sometime during these events humanity invades, an angelic army attacks but is blown up by a nuclear bomb before it can begin to pose a threat, and at the end we learn that the Olympian pantheon might exist.
General Comments
The Salvation War is dragged down largely by the author’s own lack of knowledge, his fanatical extreme right-wing viewpoint, and his tendency to horribly massacre fictional versions of those he doesn’t like. You can see the latter in the scene where he damns McNamara to hell, the ninth circle specifically. Why? McNamara cancelled the bombers Slade lusts after so much, so therefore he is a traitor. In the first book he also makes reference to myths of cities being besieged and destroyed by hordes of monsters. Now, there are tales of cities menaced by individual monsters, or being suddenly destroyed, typically by flooding – but there are no myths I know of the type Slade describes. Basic knowledge should have told Slade this was a jarring error – but he ignored it.
If you want to see more of Slade’s idiocy, look at The Big One, his longer series. Marvel at a conspiracy of immortals controlling America being treated as good! Wonder at the glee the author takes in nuclear genocide and destruction of his political enemies! Be amazed at his ignorance of basic facts about Islam (for a basic example, the Caliphate, his caricature of Arabs, has...a ‘Council of Caliphs’. Stuart doesn’t understand that you can’t have more than one supreme leader, which is precisely what a Caliph is, never mind a drat council of them). Be awed by his better characterisation of talking bombers than humans. Gaze in wonder and terror at his Soviet Union knockoff/Marxist Japanese Empire (a total contradiction up there with postmodernist ‘thought’), complete with the exact same missile designations as those of Soviet missiles.
In summary, the works of Stuart Slade have little value except as a future historians’ (a historian from the future, not of it) guide to the obsessions and paranoias of the American extreme-right wing at the beginning of the 21st century.
I don't know why it appeared on some Star Wars fansite or is discussed in this thread, but it seems to be as good as the prequels, so...
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Jun 5, 2014 07:24
I CANNOT EJACULATE WITHOUT SEEING NATIVE AMERICANS BRUTALISED!
and it lead to the most magnificient drama ever 
