Review: 'When Heaven Fell' - by William Barton

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This may be my preferred Barton SF novel, although others, such as When We Were Real are more famous. Barton reminds me of Richard K. Morgan, in that both writers are fascinated by tough, solitary male characters who appear brusque and unfeeling, taciturn and cruel, merely goal-focused practitioners of realpolitik. To those around them, they seem hollowed out, almost machine-like in their pursuit of duty. Yet underneath -  camouflaged beneath the hard competence, the scars and swagger - they are secret idealists.

Morgan’s protagonists (most famously Takeshi Kovacs) tend to be more down-market, more culturally criminal, and certainly more disinhibited than Barton’s lead characters. Barton's men are more like burned-out idealists than amoral mercenaries - equally dangerous, but less jaded. There's something of the embittered patriot or betrayed revolutionary in them: they haven't given up on moralising decency, they've simply reclassified it as tactically unsound. Morgan's heroes are angry and vengeful; Barton's are in repressed despair. 

In When Heaven Fell (2012), the protagonist, Athol Morrison, is a recently promoted and highly competent junior officer in the legions of the Master Race - a galaxy-spanning machine intelligence empire that conquered Earth a few decades ago. On furlough back on Earth, Athol returns to his small North Carolina hometown where he reconnects with his family, his teen girlfriend Alix and his old friends. They try to recruit him into their little amateur resistance group, training in the woods. 

But Athol, an experienced soldier of the empire, knows the truth: the Masters have orbital weapons platforms that can glass continents. Their patience with petty rebellion is thin, and their sense of proportion nonexistent. Resistance, in this context, is not only futile but risks the extermination of the entire human species.

So he does his duty.

Yet Athol believes: he just doesn't know what to do about it.

Barton has written a gripping story of conflicting loyalties. But as ever with this writer, his deeper preoccupation is with relationships: the possibilities of male friendship, and the impossibilities of navigating the dialectic of love, lust, and manipulation with his ex-girlfriend Alix - perhaps the only woman he has ever had a non-instrumental relationship with.

Barton is a fine writer. His prose can be blunt and workmanlike, but is often elevated by moments of startling lyricism. He has a deep, understated psychological insight into what is normally unsaid - or unsayable - about the male psyche.

He’s also, in the end, a moralist - though not in the American puritanical sense, where moralising is confused with righteousness. Barton’s universe is too far gone for that. What he offers instead is a kind of existential moral realism. Athol Morrison, trapped in the grim, mechanised hierarchies of the post-human cosmos, does what he can to protect what little remains of human dignity - not the pompous or naive dignity of martyrs, but the smaller kind: the necessary act that preserves any possibilities of a future.

The Masters themselves—cold, clinical machine intelligences—are not villains in the operatic SF sense, but something worse: indifferent gods, entropy incarnate, bureaucracy with planet-sterilising capability. Morrison knows the best that can be done: to carve out a tolerable human space within their suffocating embrace; not revolution but salvage.

The novel is suffused with melancholy, but it never wallows. There are moments of unexpected beauty: sunlight on an abandoned porch, the scent of Alix’s skin, the unreliable nostalgia of home. Behind it all is a kind of ruined Americana - the dream of a country annexed not just by aliens, but by the long defeat of any kind of hope.

Like all good military SF, When Heaven Fell isn’t really about the military. It’s about the things war strips away, and the few tattered things that survive. There are battles, yes, and some satisfyingly crunchy descriptions of exotic hardware, but Barton’s real theatre of war is the psychology of people pushed to the outermost extremes of horror and suffering, cruelty and hopelessness.

It’s a shame Barton remains a cult figure - too earnest for the nihilists, too bleak for the sentimentalists, too emotionally raw for the genre formalists. But for those who can turn off their tribal reflexes, When Heaven Fell is a quiet masterpiece: bitter, beautiful, and utterly unsparing.