Hardfought is a Nebula-award winning novella by Greg Bear. It follows two beings on opposite sides of a war, a Senexi branch-ind (a globular alien that is part of a hive mind) and a human glover (a genetically manipulated human fighter), through their parallel paths to better understanding each other.
The narrative of Hardfought was easily one of the strangest I’ve read in a long while. I’ve read a couple of other books by Greg Bear (Star Wars: Rogue Planet and Halo: Cryptum), so I was aware that his books can be a little tougher than your average mainstream novel. Halo Cryptum in particular had me scratching my head for a bit because Bear dumps you into a Forerunner point of view without any hand-holding. So many ideas and aspects of Forerunner culture and technology are not explained specifically because a Forerunner wouldn’t need any explanation.
In Hardfought, Bear does the same thing but he goes to the extreme with it: character dialogue is absolutely crammed with strange jargon, speech, thought processes, and syntax are rearranged and choppy to convey different modes of thought. It comes across as incredibly alien and makes the story itself difficult to follow at times. There’s one point where it’s just a solid wall of incomprehensible jargon.
But like the other books of his that I’ve read, once you get past the stylistic storytelling choices, the story itself is quite poignant. The main idea of Hardfought, so far as I can tell, is that no matter how alien we think we are, there’s still something connecting us, making us more similar to our enemies than we realize. And the stylistic choices in writing style serve to support that theme in a beautiful, cohesive way. I can definitely see why it won a Nebula.
Did I enjoy the book? Not exactly. My first instinct was to think “what a mess of a story! Who would read this?”
But upon further reflection, I started seeing the subtleties of the story, its themes, and how everything is conveyed through an innovative and strange writing style. I found that I can really appreciate what Greg Bear did with it on a technical level. How he approached alien mindsets by manipulating the dialogue and stuffing the text with incomprehensible jargon really drove home the overall feeling of otherness. The characters weren’t just blue or green humans; they were creatures who’d developed in a completely different environment than us, with different thought processes, different ways of looking at the universe, different sets of instinct, knowledge, memory, and history to pull from.
Even though I didn’t particularly enjoy Hardfought in the same way as other stories, I have already found ways to use at least one of the ideas to improve an alien species in my own galaxy. Hardfought also made me start thinking about aliens in a somewhat different way: how can I make my aliens feel as though they don’t just look different, but think and see the galaxy in a truly alien way?
This got me thinking about my own approach to writing alien cultures, particularly with the Merdet in my short story, Stardust Found. At the end of Stardust Found, I introduced Nrea, a character of the Merdet species, which are hermaphroditic aliens possessing both male and female genitalia. As a result, their view of gender is starkly different from our own as humans. Their language and their approach to societal structure and behavior norms has developed along a separate path from that of other species. Nrea the Merdet is a challenging but fascinating character for me to write. Hardfought has given me some ideas on how to convey the aliennes of the Merdet in general and Nrea specifically.
This is why I’m a big proponent of reading outside your comfort zone. Whether it be a genre you don’t normally read or a book within your genre that unsettles you, I think there is value in stretching beyond what is purely comfortable. You might just find a new way of looking at the world that enhances your own perspective.
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