Terra Nullius (2/5)
Before I say anything else, I'm going to establish three things.
1) However I feel about the book, I'm going to start by saying that among anything else, I don't think it's that well written. The writing is basic, with sometimes entire chapters devoted to just plain narrative. The characters are bland, and are either "good" or "evil." There's little nuance to be found here. There's far too many characters for its relatively short length, and there's no real core direction of the story. It's "stuff" that's happening over a period of time.
2) I did go into this book aware of the twist, so I can concede that might have coloured my impression on the book going into it.
3) You can accuse me of "white fragility" if you want, it's your prerogative. Doesn't change my argument.
So, with that aside, let's get down to the actual review. I actually considered giving this book separate Watsonian and Doylist analyses, but I'm going to instead go through the book point by point, such as it is. So, with that said...
Terra Nullius derives its name from the actual phrase and legal concept - the idea of Australia being "no-one's land," as declared by Cook prior to colonization. Patently untrue of course, but it's a mandate that technically legally existed until the 1990s and the introduction of native title. Appropriately enough, what's depicted is an Aboriginal boy fleeing from one of the "Settler" missions. There's no real time period identified, but it's kind of a moot point. Settlers are pushing Aboriginals off their land, even though the land itself is harsh, lacking water and all that. Natives are being forced to flee, or are being sent to settlements, or are being massacred at their camp sites. Meanwhile there's a nun from one of the missions who's being investigated by her superiors for her treatment, and the Troopers are hunting Jacky (the protagonist), and yadda yadda yadda. One of the troopers goes rogue after one of said massacres and joins the natives. This state of affairs lasts for about 100 pages (i.e. one third of the book) and apart from Jacky trying to find home, there isn't that much of a core plot. Lots of little plots, but none of which are really engaging. It's not misery porn - not quite - but the first 100 pages exist for one thing, and one thing only. Life sucks. It sucks for the Settlers, who aren't used to such a dry environment, and it sucks even more for the Indigenous people who get to experience disposession, death, abduction, and all that stuff. When, finally, after 100 pages, the book has its twist moment - the "Settlers" are aliens, and the "Natives" are humanity in general. This isn't some point in the past, this is a dystopian future.
...this is a stupid twist.
I know, I know, you're going to say "but analogy!" but even analogy has to have some level of in-universe rationale behind it. The hows and whys of Earth invasion/colonization isn't given all at once, but I'm going to do so here, and get my gripes out of the way.
First of all, the tech level of the "Settlers" is schizophrenic, and it's telling that the first 100 pages is bereft of technology that will be deployed later on, and even then it's stretching credulity to breaking point. But I'm actually going to go into the setting's in-universe chronology to get to the heart of the matter.
So, the premise is that humanity and the Settlers (or "Toads," as they're otherwise called, as they're described as being like bipedal salamanders) evolved at the same time, but on different sides of the galaxy. How this is actually known by humans in-universe I don't know, but whatever - while we were climbing down from the trees, they were climbing out of the swamps of their homeworld. However, the premise is that on their side of the galaxy, space was much "denser" in terms of how many alien species there were. Ergo, the Toads were forced to develop interplanetary travel to fight off their neighbours, which meant that they developed technologically much faster than we did. The analogy here (and it's an analogy that's explicitly spelt out for us via epigraph) is that this part of space is Europe, and Earth is Australia, the premise being that higher population density leads to higher conflict and technological innovation. Ergo, the Toads rule the galaxy (or at least a significant portion of it) just as Europe ruled much of the world.
As analogies go, this isn't the worst one in the world, though it's spurious to claim that density = conflict. There have been plenty of non-European empires throughout history, and excluding Rome, predated said empires. One of the largest of which was the Mongol Empire, and their density sure as hell wasn't high. There's a lot of debate as to whether warfare is endemic to humanity or not, but that's beside the point. I can buy the analogy, even if it's much more spurious to claim (as the book does verbatim) that Earth's history is basically "Europe warlike, every other civilization in human history peaceful". However, what I'm left to ask is how the heck this even makes sense in-universe. What does a "denser region of space" even mean? If there were aliens at Alpha Centauri, that still wouldn't mean anything to us because we can't reach AC within any reasonable timeframe. The notion that "we never developed interstellar space travel because there was no-one to fight" doesn't makes sense because the reason space travel was developed at all was because of the Cold War. Conflict drives innovation. The novel acknowledges that, but only to a point. The only thing I can think of is that in this "denser region of space" radio signals were picked up, which prompted aliens there to develop space travel faster, but the novel never explains how or why. If it's radio signals, and human and Toad development was parallel up to a point, that means that within 100 years the Toads went from 20th century technology to galactic empire. If it's a case of suffering alien invasion, then I'm left to ask how they survived at all. There's reference to them doing so, but it's not gone into. The novel is concerned with being analogy first. Unfortunately, it's analogy that's to the detriment of its in-universe worldbuilding.
So, whatever. I don't know why one side of the galaxy was arbitrarily denser than the other, but in the year 2041, the Toads showed up and conquered Earth without much effort, since they could shut down most human technology with the touch of a button. Okay, fair enough. Works in-universe, works out of universe. What I want to know is why the Settlers apparently have the equivalent of 19th century technology otherwise. Because they settle on Earth, but stay out of the more arid regions - by analogy, this is the equivalent of settlement/invasion/colonization of Australia, how drier regions were explored/settled much later than the coastal areas. By in-universe rationale, the Toads require a constant supply of moisture, and while they do sweat like humans, we're much better at coping at heat than they are. Okay, fair enough. What's harder to swallow is the fact that despite being an interstellar civilization, they lack 20th century technology, or at least the equivalent of 20th century technology. They rely on mounts, they rely on trackers, they have "flyers," but otherwise appear to function at a pre-modern level. This is essential for the twist, but it feels like cheating. I can concede that not every alien species is going to follow the same path as humanity, and there's real-world examples of civilizations that missed what we might consider 'key steps,' (e.g. the Incas never developed the wheel, but still had an empire), but come on, seriously? The aliens can master FTL travel, but don't have drones, or cars, or heck, anything that was old news a century ago?
This is part of why I think the novel is stymied by going the route of analogy. If it wanted to tell the settlement of Australia from an Indigenous perspective, more power to it, but the whole analogy thing keeps failing because it requires so many leaps of faith that its in-universe rationale breaks down. And if I'm judging it by analogy, sometimes I'm left asking where the analogy is. For instance, the Toads have human baby farms to breed slaves (something that never happened in Oz), or there's the in-universe premise that humans are the only species in the galaxy that creates art (...seriously, what's the analogy here?). Sometimes it works, mind you - for instance, the Toads believe in "God" and have "scriptures," and their order justifies slavery by the logic of "God didn't describe life on other planets, so ergo, the creatures of these planets aren't sapient, ergo, it isn't slavery, because we're using animals, not sapient species, but even then, I'm left to buy that the Toads developed a religion that's almost exactly identical to Christianity, that has almost the exact same holy text, that's used said text to justify slavery in almost exactly the same way. Heck, Kang and Kodos are blushing, even after acknowledging that by some amazing coincidence, English and Rygellian are exactly the same. I get why this exists as a writing tool (to justify the twist), but as an in-universe plot device? It's a stretch.
So, the book goes on. Stuff happens. A good Toad joins our humans, whose function in the story is to show how evil the Toads are, and how he can lament how evil they are, and all that stuff. There's a line where, near verbatim, the rationale goes "we [the Toads] put society before family, while you [humans] put family before society," ergo, Toads have an 'evil' culture, humans have a 'good' culture. Yeah, okay, fine, whatever. I might not have minded so much if the last epigraph of the novel is a statement that everything the Toads have done has a counterpart in human history, that they're inhuman, not nonhuman, but when you spend 300 pages showing us and establishing that the Toads are psychopaths (bar two exceptions), who have a culture that's bereft of any literary merit, who have a culture where art literally does not exist, then...yeah. You don't...you don't DO this in fiction. You don't spend 300 pages showing us how evil your antagonists are and then at the end have the equivalent of "well they're not that bad." And if we go by the analogy, if we consider the in-universe functions as being representative of the real-world, then, yikes. And no, the 'good Toad' isn't moral ambiguity when his role in the novel exists to serve the paradigm of how evil the Toads are. It would be the equivalent of Lord of the Rings adding an orc character to the Fellowship spending the bulk of the novel describing how evil orcs are, and then expecting the reader to conclude that the orcs aren't universally evil because one of them recognises how evil they are.
Again, I'll reiterate that this book didn't need to be analogy. There's a moment before the twist where we see troopers massace a group of "natives," this being a point in time where we believe that the Settlers are Europeans and the natives are Aboriginals. It's bloody, it's heinous, and it 'works,' because this is a factor of colonization that actually happened. When the novel stresses how outmatched the natives are technologically, when we learn later on that a single Toad rifle has the power of a howitzer (they're implied to be plasma weapons), then the analogy still holds up. But it's an exception to the rule.
Some last things. I've seen in other reviews that the book is one without hope, that there aren't that many humans left, and I've got to say, I really don't get that. The book is replete with references to humans holding out in the driest areas of Earth and conducting armed resistance, such as in Mexico, Nevada, Afghanistan (apparently the US military is still in Afghanistan by 2041...yay...), and there's so many humans left that the Toads consider dumping all of humanity in Australia and abandoning the continent. We don't get a sense of how many Toads there are exactly on Earth (we can assume in the billions), but it's left vague as to why the Toads would even bother with the dry areas when there's presumably still room in cooler areas, and with humans still existing in/near said areas. There's also epigraphs that appear to be flash-forwards, that are set well beyond the timeframe of the novel, where humans address the "Settler Parliment" or conduct "Invasion Day" protests. These are obvious analogies to Australia's contemporary situation, and I don't mind them. But what's harder to swallow is that the last lines in the novel imply that the fight will continue, whereas the flash forwards suggest that the 'fight' becomes entirely political in the novel's future. Fair enough, but there's little to bridge the two.
Oh, and Martin Freeman (or someone called Martin Freeman) apparently became an admiral in the British Navy by 2041, whose role in the novel is to take borderline glee in describing how the Toads wiped out the entirety of London's population (it's implied that the entirety of England, and possibly all of the UK, was likewise removed of all humans) with the rationale of "we deserved it." Make of that what you will.
At the end of the day, this novel seems to want to have its cake and eat it. It wants to be analogy and alien invasion story, and it fails to be both. Coupled with characters I couldn't invest in, and what we have is a book that just isn't that engaging. I get what it's trying to do. I just don't think it succeeds that well.
