Sci-fi novel ‘Soldiers’ is October’s club choice

John Dalmas isn’t feeling well.

The local author of “Soldiers” — the October reading selection of The Spokesman-Review Book Club — neglected to get his pneumonia shot earlier this year, and so he’s been coughing and sneezing with what he calls “walking pneumonia.”

“I went through three handkerchiefs in an hour,” he says in a raspy voice over the phone. “Fortunately, I have lots of handkerchiefs. And there’s always the washer and dryer.”

This is what age does to you: It breaks you down physically, slowly but surely.

Dalmas, though, is tougher than most. And toughness is what you need to do the variety of jobs that he has held in his 78 years.

Farm worker, paratrooper, stevedore, able seaman, logger and smokejumper —as well as research ecologist, freelance editor and writer —Dalmas has done it all and more.

The “more” involves the 27 novels that he has seen published, most of them since 1983.

It was while working as a fireman on a Great Lakes freighter that he first got turned on to the genre that he would eventually embrace: science fiction.

“When I was young, I read books without paying any attention to who was writing them,” Dalmas said in a 1986 interview. “Poul Anderson was one of the first I became aware of as a writer.”

Fifteen years later, after earning a bachelor’s degree in forestry and a Ph.D. in plant ecology, Dalmas started his own writing career. After reading what he thought was a poor imitation of a Robert E. Howard novel (Howard was the creator of the “Conan the Barbarian” series), Dalmas wrote what would become his first published story.

An expanded version of “The Yngling” (1971) became his first published novel, prompting him to adopt the Swedish-sounding surname that graces his book covers. (His actual name is John Robert Jones.)

After struggling for more than a decade, Dalmas sold his second novel, 1983’s “The Varkhaus Conspiracy,” and he’s never looked back.

A Spokane resident since 1985, Dalmas lives in a modest North Side duplex with his wife Gail. (If you want to more know about his past, go to his Web site at www.sfwa.org/members/dalmas/personal.html.)

“Soldiers” (Baen, 608 pages, $7.99 paper), Dalmas’ 25th novel, was written in 2001. It is an ambitious, complex and many-charactered study of humanity facing its greatest challenge: an invading, and distinctly unfriendly, alien race with thousands of armed warships.

“What it grew out of more than anything else was the peace movement, you might say, in our world today,” Dalmas says. “I think the peace movement is essential. But a lot of times it’s not a good idea to go along with it. So I just cooked up a situation where it was a matter of fight a war or be eliminated as a species.”

“Soldiers” is much more than that. In the course of the book, Dalmas, like all good sci-fi writers, touches on a number of controversial issues: religious zealotry, cultural differences between the humans living in colonial outposts and those back on Earth, the art of mental communication between “idiot savants” (that are key to human survival), the act of combining human and robotic parts (and what, then, constitutes the very term “human”).

And maybe best of all, he gives us a glimpse into the minds of the aliens:

“Stars exploded onto the screen, glorious, a panoply of brilliant points almost stunning in their collective beauty. For a moment (Grand Admiral) Quanshûk’s emotions soared, then responsibility took command. Responsibility for 26 million people. What would they find in this distant place, or what would find them? Every earlier swarm, over the centuries, had expanded the empire’s existing boundaries into space already probed by scouts. But this —was territory totally unknown.”

The result is a book that evokes a wide range of reactions, even among devoted sci-fi readers.

” ‘Soldiers’ is an old-fashioned Ripping Yarn, which overflows with action and ideas, often at the expense of structure and focus,” wrote an online reviewer for www.sfsite.com.

“The most interesting and important part of the story is the cast,” wrote a more enthusiastic Amazon.com reviewer. “One develops a real affection for many of the characters, and the wrap-up lets the reader find out what happened to them after the main story is concluded. It’s rather like being able to stay in touch with old friends.”

Dalmas “explores new facets of the cyborg warrior and his social background,” wrote a British Amazon.com critic, “and the conflict between those who are true pacifists and those who see a need for war in extreme situations is cleverly contrasted. He develops the citizen soldier theme to a level beyond the ‘jingoistic’ approach of (Robert) Heinlein’s space troopers.”

Comparing Dalmas to Heinlein, a sci-fi legend, is heady stuff. What Dalmas will say, between coughing spells, is that he likes to explore the differences between what seems to be and what really is.

“I’ve read a lot of history, and I can’t help but believe —and some people can’t believe this is true —that we’re less warlike than we used to be,” he says. “But I’m convinced that we’re notably less warlike than we used to be. So I set this far enough in the future so that this tendency to being more civilized is unquestionable.”

So, then, in the face of certain annihilation, what is there to do? Well, as Dalmas has proven with his own life, tough times require tough people. And as Pete Seger sings (with thanks to the book of Ecclesiastes), to everything there is a season —and a time for every purpose under heaven.

Including, sadly enough, the purpose served by soldiers.