Christopher Rowley
The Vang: The Military Form

"The Vang: The Military Form" (1998) by Christopher Rowley is one of those science fiction novels not ascribable to the more "speculative" genre. The same "Cosmo" series by Editrice Nord, which published the novel in Italy in 2002, presents it as a "space-opera of pure entertainment" and indeed once you reach the end and retrace the progress of the entire story, I must say that it truly is something entertaining, captivating, and breathtaking, and from this perspective, surprising and less banal than one might think just from the presentation. A story set in a distant future on a planet light-years away from Earth, named Saskatch, and already itself "problematic:" sparsely populated and characterized by a harsh climate unsuitable for hosting life, and the sole interest of the worst fences in the galaxy due to the trafficking of tropic acid 45 aka AT45 (practically the most coveted drug of the human hegemony). It might initially seem like the premises are there to tell a kind of thriller set in the future and in a frontier world ruled by the Korean mafia and where the government is corrupt and deeply implicated in drug trafficking, but instead, Saskatch soon finds itself facing an unforeseen event: the attack of an invasive alien species, the so-called Vang, a warrior and parasitic race that spreads like a virus, reproducing and developing at incredible speed, using the human body as a kind of container shell to impregnate and where to germinate new forms and systems of life.

The last member of the species, believed to be extinct after being defeated in war and having definitively disappeared, was orbiting Saskatch from a remote age within a spaceship immersed in what is practically a preservation sleep: it is their main seed, the so-called "military form." Its awakening will set in motion a chain of events that will soon transform, due to its cunning and preparedness and innate predisposition to the art of war, into an unexpected and unstoppable large-scale invasion. If at the beginning the novel lends itself to addressing various aspects of the planet, providing us with a wide overview of the world in which the story is set, we can however confidently state that the true protagonist of the story, from its first appearance, is precisely the military form, one of the "superior" forms of its species, but not the main one and that it is nonetheless compelled to generate and obey according to what its nature and discipline dictate, the systemic organization of each one's tasks. A rigor that sooner or later, as in every military regime and in this specific case where everything must happen quickly (things will indeed prove less easy than they might have seemed), can only lead to inevitability and something tragic.

This is, in broad strokes, the content of a novel that, more than for the story as a whole, specializes and differentiates itself for the fantasy and the skill of the author who invents from scratch an unprecedented alien species and manages to narrate it, not without grotesque or downright horrific traits (something reminiscent of "The Dreamcatcher" by Stephen King), and whose ensuing suggestions are certainly the main dish of the day's menu, every aspect both of a physical and aesthetic nature as well as behavioral and psychological. At least interesting, and as already mentioned, certainly captivating (the entire sequence from the capture of the prisons onward is truly breathtaking), in hindsight some parallels between alien psychology and that of human beings are certainly not out of place and could, in another type of story, have been further explored, but the author does not actually have enough space to expand too much on this aspect: his time to save the human race and the galaxy as we know it is short, there is not a single second to waste, and every decision has to be made quickly before the Vang virus spreads and infects every known planet.