53 pages • 1-hour read
Caliban's War
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Themes
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of illness and the death of a child.
Strategic Versus Heroic Action
Caliban’s War interrogates the modes and motives of heroism, examining its potential for world-changing positive outcomes and the less positive consequences of its unilateral or impulsive nature.
The novel compares the short bursts of heroism to the long-term strategies of politicians on Earth and Mars. Unlike Bobbie and Holden, who want to move fast, Avasarala sees herself as building the influence to shape larger events, accumulating lasting power by manipulating others and find opportunities. In the novel, Avasarala’s skills are crucial to the protagonists’ victory: She gets Admiral Souther on their side and makes connections between the protomolecule soldiers and the construction on Venus, and has the reach to unite their multifarious efforts. At the same time, the novel argues that focusing solely on large strategy can blind the wielders of power to the human costs of their actions. Working far from the physical conflict, politicians and other power players like Avasarala, Errinwright, and Jules-Pierre Mao are outside the typical dangers of warfare. Extensive political influence, great wealth, and access to resources render them seemingly untouchable. For Errinwright and Mao, this remove results in a distinct lack of empathy and a self-dealing focus on profits. By showing that she can enter the fray by directly participating in the climactic battle and by never losing sight of the trauma of losing her son, Avasarala avoids the callousness that defines the novel’s other strategists.
Bobbie exemplifies one version of heroism—that of a soldier ready to support her unit until death. Bobbie’s mode of decisive action values straightforwardness in technique and intention; she is eager to put on her suit and fight enemies, and has little patience for talking around problems or waiting for Avasarala’s feints and counters to generate results. While Bobbie’s selfless protection of others and her willingness to put herself in harm’s way are clearly heroic, there are downsides to engaging in combat without first planning. In the first confrontation with the protomolecule hybrids, Bobbie’s entire squad is killed despite their elite fighting prowess. Only when she reviews the footage, learns the creatures’ abilities, and plans for how to counter them by using her suit’s capabilities in a strategic way, does she prevail in hand-to-hand combat with them.
Holden embodies another type of hero: the archetypal lone gun unwilling to consider the opinions or expertise of his team. For Holden, this kind of unilateral thinking tends towards positive action, but as Naomi points out, his vigilantism doesn’t leave room for nuance, and whatever justice Holden metes out is incidental—the luck of the draw because he happens to be an upstanding man. For every Admiral Nguyen, whose shooting everyone agrees is justified, there are scenarios where other modes of action would have been preferable. What Holden’s approach fails at is upholding one of the core values the series upholds: working together to achieve a laudable aim. Rescuing kidnapped children, stopping protomolecule hybrids, and preventing planetary war can only be accomplished through the efforts of all the protagonists; solo sacrifice, while noble, is too short-lived to bring about meaningful and lasting change.
The Limits of Scientific Knowledge
Science fiction typically reflects and critiques both human advancement and the limitations that endure. In the novel, technological power and capacity is correlated to the desire for conquest and colonization, as the weaponized protomolecule is figured as part of the progression that begins with the invention of spears and gunpowder. The novel’s antagonists see this discovery as the next leap after spaceships with point defense cannons: a new way to amass resources and land for their own group. However, the novel portrays Mao, Errinwright, and Nguyen as scientifically blinkered despite their seeming quest for innovation because they ignore the protomolecule’s most extraordinarily ability: to defy the known laws of physics. The relationship between humans and this alien device illuminates human ambition as a destructive force and contrasts it with the pursuit of pure science, which is a source of awe and optimism.
For most of the book, scientific advancement is depicted as beautiful. Prax feels pride in his botanical research, knowing that his discoveries support life on distant colonies; the existing treatment for Mei’s condition points to advancements in medicine. Other characters often contemplate the wonder of the fictional Epstein drive, which enables fragile humans to hurtle massive distances through space in small metal containers. Holden, though he has been traveling through space for years, has a moment of awe when he stands outside the ship and contemplates the vastness of space and its host of stars; his experience of the cosmos is similar to the first-time EVA thoughts of Prax, showing that the characters never quite get used to the majesty of their technologically-accessed surroundings.
Almost immediately, however, thoughts of space’s enormity translate into its potential for development. Even protagonists who oppose the oppression and subjugation of others cannot help but cast themselves into the role of colonists. Holden wonders how many of the stars he sees have habitable planets, and whether future generations might reach and explore them—ideas that foreshadow where the rest of the series will go once the protomolecule creates the Ring. Human techno-optimism imagines that only the limitations of current technology create limits to knowledge.
Other elements of the novel point out the danger of this philosophy. Prax’s explanation of the cascade—a complex system that breaks down when a small number of its interdependent parts stops working—shows a much more important limitation to the knowledge the novel’s humans have. Understanding how the colony on Ganymede is collapsing isn’t enough to prevent it; its inhabitants cannot repair temperature control, air filtration, and food supply systems at the same time, so life on the moon becomes insupportable. This suggests that habitual reliance on complex systems and taking their components for granted risks massive instability and loss of life when that infrastructure is damaged. In contrast to such destroyable human-made systems, the novel presents the seemingly flawless and incomprehensible system of the protomolecule’s construction on Venus and the infected hybrid creatures. Although separated by enormous distances, they communicate instantaneously and time their attacks in ways that humans cannot anticipate or decipher. Human systems are in persistent danger of cascading; building ones that withstand collapse is outside the scope of scientific knowledge.
The Bonds of Family
Given that the stakes of the plot are the future of humanity itself, it may be surprising that the novel devotes so much time to exploring affection between people. However, the novel argues that it is this aspect of the human experience that makes humanity worth protecting. Each protagonist is motivated by their attachment to others; the desire to preserve loved ones fuels their sometimes impossible-seeming mission.
Avasarala’s family humanizes her and keeps her grounded; her relationships with them offer her the broader moral compass she harnesses as a powerful political leader. Her loving husband, Arjun is her complement and balance; her granddaughters, the children of her surviving daughter, are a consolation for the loss of her son. Avasarala also draws on familial trauma for her ethics. The tragedy of her son’s death makes protecting other children foremost for her. She condemns Soren’s betrayal in terms of human life, tallying how many young people died because of his lies. When she wants to stop Errinwright and Nguyen, she is primarily motivated by the desire to protect children and not allow one more death.
Other protagonists are also motivated by family ties, both of the biological and found kind. Though their outlooks are typically more immediate and narrow than Avasarala’s solar system-spanning considerations, they illustrate the value of sustaining bonds of affection. Prax’s sole mission is to rescue his daughter, Mei, while his sense of loss over the rift with his ex-wife suggests that their estrangement hurt him deeply. Holden’s evolution from casual hookups to a serious monogamous relationship with Naomi inspires a desire for family life, as he hopes to have children with her. Holden also comes to think of the crew of the Rocinante as his family; when Amos is shot and seriously wounded, Holden realizes how important it is to him to protect what they have. Bobbie experiences the loss of one family and the discovery of two others. She first joins the crew to avenge the deaths of her fellow Marines—a squad that she feels unconditional loyalty towards. As she gets to know Avasarala and the Roci crew, she grows new attachments that propel her to reconsider blinkered vengeance and to formulate a strategy for fighting the hybrids instead. At the end of the novel, she decides to reconnect with one more family unit: Her own biological relatives.
The novel’s found families demonstrate the strength of diverse opinions and skillsets to accomplishing seemingly impossible goals. Seeing each other as found family prompts the Roci’s crewmates to fully commit to fighting their common enemy together. In contrast, the antagonists, who are working for their own self-aggrandizement and in pursuit of power, refuse to acknowledge critiques of their approach or cooperate in supportive ways. The novel concludes that the most productive ideals are rooted in loyalty, respect, and affection; these motivations enable the protagonists to achieve the impossible.
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