Book Review: Pat Tomlinson's Unfinished Novel "Herd Immunity"
Getting through this was no 'Milk-run'.
BACK AROUND CHRISTMAS, a gift was bestowed upon the internet; someone had gotten their hands on a .docx file of an unfinished novel titled Herd Immunity by none other than Pat Tomlinson. He’d tweeted about doing a screenplay treatment of it back in 2019, and it’s since been thought to have been lost to the desktop recycle bin of some intern with better things to do. Well, it seems Pat tried his hand at shaping it into a novel in 2021, and files of both a partial eight-chapter manuscript and a six-page outline have cropped up on several forums.
You can get your copy here if you’re feeling masochistic, or you can read on, because we here at Upstream decided to give Pat’s unfinished trashterpiece the same treatment we gave John Scalzi a few years ago. We bagged on Kaiju Preservation Society hard and KPS might as well be Heart of Darkness by comparison.
THE OUTLINE: Pat’s outline is six pages long yet lacks a definite ending, saying at the end of page six that “Even I don’t know what’s going to come out the other end of this furball.” I doubt it would have mattered, as while the outline does lay out what seems to be 3/4 of the story, you’ll DNF the thing well before then.
Anyway, our story centers around a badass female Space Marine™ whose final mission turns her into a badass female multiple amputee, upping her position in the intersectionality hierarchy. Having sufficiently alienated herself from the military, her parents and her planet’s governor, she takes a gig working on the home world of the aliens she just fought to guard a herd of sentient six-legged “hexaphants” that are sacred to them. The outline explains the story further, but that’s where the manuscript itself about ends, so I’ll save you the brain cells and leave it there. Ready? No. No, you are not.
Chapter One
Page 2- “The mission briefing room was hot, again. Like, swamp ass hot,” is the single worst opening line I’ve ever read. Off to a great start.
Pat calls the border dividing the light and dark sides of a planet a “terminus”. It’s terminator, you fat rube.
In-universe currency is “Nudollars”, which aside from being unnecessarily capitalized, is retarded. I’m guessing this was inspired by Shadowrun’s NuYen, which worked because it was a) cyberpunk, a genre heavily inspired by various elements of Japanese culture and b) published during a period in which Japan saw a surging economy and encroaching influence in the U.S., which made a vision of the yen becoming the dominant world currency seem at least somewhat plausible.
Pat, there’s no shame is using the old standard “credits”. If its good enough for Star Wars, its good enough for this dog water.
Sorento, one of only two male marines in the squad, complains about the lack of AC, saying they “bet the Officer’s mess could double as a meat locker”, to which someone else adds that “they have hot and cold running Champaign taps”. Yes, Champagne is both misspelled and apparently served hot for some reason. The character who makes this quip, Liska, vapes and shares in what I imagine Pat thought was playfully flirtatious banter. Their commanding officer, Lt. Corinthian, whose gender is never established, tells them to get a room, to the comedic delight of everyone. Omniscient narrator says that Sorento and Liska should ‘just fuck and get it over with’.
The bunch are nicknamed “meteor madmen”, a team of specialist soldiers who drop onto a planet’s surface in person-sized drop pods called sarcophagi and map out targets for orbital bombardments from a planet’s surface, then quickly exfil out. The name for the unit seems odd since eight of the ten members of the group are female, and the book later mentions that Porter, the only other male in the unit, only joined the group because they had run ‘a woman short’, indicating the unit tended to be traditionally if not intentionally all-female. The significance, if there ever was supposed to be any, of the unit being mostly women is never fleshed out, which is strange since Tomlinson often does his level best to shoehorn in intersectionality in every orifice of any story he’s writing to get maximum good boy points from the SFWA crowd.
Hostile alien species are described as wasps; I’m choosing to believe this was a subconscious choice by Pat to project his own racial self-loathing onto his antagonists.
Pat has a strange habit of needlessly hyphenating things, ie: well-digger, life-support, worst-case, best-case and his favorite, milk-run, which may or may not appear capitalized, in quotes or both. Porter thinks it means getting the shits when you eat ice cream.
Name of the ship they’re on is the Musk, fucking LMAO. You have to remember this was written in 2021, before The Dark Times.
Page 3— The upshot of the mission is that humanity is at war with a race of flying insect-like aliens, though a treaty is expected to be announced imminently. But it hasn’t come yet, so the team’s scheduled drop into a battle zone to map out targets for bombardment is proceeding as planned. Corinthian remarks, “I swear to god, if one of you giggles about ‘insertion’ . . .’ Yes, the “g” in God is lowercase because Pat couldn’t help himself.
Group of soldiers is described as ‘misfits and rejects’ despite majority of them winding up as unnamed cannon fodder in the next chapter.
The mission is explained as a lay-up (trope!), Lieutenant wants things done by the book (trope!), and reminds them “we’re not looking for a repeat of (past mission gone horribly wrong—trope!) Also, Pat’s hard-ass military jargon reads like tryhard juvenile HALO fanfiction.
Page 4— FEDORA ALERT:
“Stanton had seen too much poverty, blood, unanswered prayers, and death in her short life to wrap herself in the luxury of religion. Superstition, on the other hand, now that was a hard habit to break any baseball fan or ground-pounder of. Which was why in place of prayer, Stanton snapped her fingers and spat on the deck before climbing into Cynthia.”
(Cynthia is the name of her power armor—you didn’t think Pat was only going to steal the idea for the bugs from Starship Troopers, did you?)
Pat again foreshadows what an easy, by-the-numbers ‘Milk-run’ the mission is, this time in single quotes. Beat the reader over the head with it a little more, you fat asshole.
“came” is misspelled.
Porter’s power armor is described exactly like Iron Man’s, because of course it is. His personality is fleshed out a bit (through telling, not showing), mentioning that while he’s the junior member of the group, he was reliable and never complained, making him the most likable character. I wonder how Pat will kill him.
Page 5—”So damn funny.” IYKYK.
Pat steals a joke from Alan Shepherd (or John Glenn) without crediting them about a drop pod being build by the lowest bidder. The team’s big cheer before sendoff are Saliva lyrics. Almost the entire page is Pat pleasuring himself to completion with inches-thick paragraphs of faux military and physics jargon. The process of the “caskets” dropping onto the planet is smothered so thickly with needless description the scene carries zero weight, charm or tension. Heinlein he fucking ain’t.
Page 6— Uh oh! The team starts taking heavy fire! It wasn’t a “Milk-Run”™ at all! Also, Porter dies, Corinthian dies, and Stanton gets blown off course, but all the tension of the scene are peppered with James Gunn levels of quirk that constantly ruin it.
Page7— Still going. Tomlinson couldn’t write with brevity if he had a gun to his sizeable head, which completely kills any drama this ostensibly high-adrenaline scene is supposed to have. Every sentence of something happening is succeeded by four or five more explaining minutiae that bog the entire scene down and at this point I’m rooting for the bugs.
Page 8— Stanton’s “casket” finally lands. To give credit where it’s due, Tomlinson actually does a good job of describing the struggle of Stanton fighting against her injuries to escape the battered pod before the wasps reach her position to finish her off. This is actually pretty damn well done. It’s visceral and, crucially, concise. These few passages are a fleeting glimpse at the writer Tomlinson could be, if he chose to prioritize storytelling above trend chasing or modern day politics.
Page 9— Stanton discovers only four members of her ten-woman squad are alive. Porter further confirmed KIA. It’s a wonder why Tomlinson bothered to introduce him at all. Stanton somehow seems surprised that the enemy is still participating in a war when the “any-day-now” peace treaty between the two sides hasn’t actually happened yet.
Stanton finds Liska, and refers to her as “puta”, giving the first indication in the book that Liska is Hispanic, since absolutely none of the characters in this story are ever described at all in the slightest. Presuming Stanton is white due to her first name being Erin, this seems like quite the uh . . . problematic exchange. It also comes across as forced. Given Pat’s propensity for derivation, I have no doubt that Liska was imagined as a stand-in for Vazquez from Aliens, but Pat missed such crucial details as Vazquez being likable, loyal and competent. Dan O’Bannon he fucking ain’t.
Also, “within” is misspelled.
Page 11— Liska establishes radio contact with the other two members of her group while wasps close in on her, but I have no idea who the fuck Meteor Eight is compared to Meteor Three or Meteor Nine, who is also being referred to as ‘they’. The other two bite it, leaving only Stanton and Puta.
After she requests an orbital strike from the Musk, someone on the ship breaks the bad news that the treaty’s been ratified and her orders are to stand down, even though they’re about to be killed by an oncoming horde of bugs. The ships refuse to assist, and Stanton preps for a last stand. One ship goes against orders and saves the two, but not before they both get caught in an explosion. This scene is actually serviceable. though difficult to enjoy because the reason behind the drama of it is utterly brainless. So this peace treaty was literal minutes away from actually happening and the CCDF just risked lives and went ahead business as usual anyway? You’re telling me this thing was as in the bag as it could be but nobody bothered to declare a formal ceasefire beforehand?
Uh huh. Sure, okay. The entire premise for the inciting incident of the book’s rising action is absurd. Too absurd to get past for me. But you have to remember this is the guy who thought Ukrainian soldiers could disable Russian tanks with paint-filled balloons. Were I a new reader to Tomlinson’s work, I’d have DNF’d it here.
Chapter Two
Page 14— Stanton wakes up in a medical ship and immediately assaults a (male) orderly despite missing an arm and a leg. Issues threat via Patented Pat Tomlinson One. Word. At. A. Time. style delivery. The badest-ass girlboss-est Space Marine™ evar has to be ordered by a (female) superior officer to allow the orderly to help her back into her bed like a real Cee U Next Tuesday.
Page 16— Pat, in true civilian fashion, has his MC refuse medals presented to her because “we never even got a round off”, and “I don’t deserve a Bronze Star for getting half my ass shot off.” Somehow I think someone who’s actually earned those medals would have more respect for them. Anyway, the XO tells Stanton she’s discharged, don’t come back. Stanton cries.
Page 17— Liska visits and offers to take Stanton to attend the burial at space for their fallen comrades. Our heroine refuses to pay her respects, saying “They won’t mind if I take a mental health day.” WOW I hate this bitch.
Instead of Liska tipping Stanton over in her wheelchair and leaving her on the floor like the heap of garbage she is, Staton warmly calls Liska puta one more time before they part ways.
Chapter Three
Pages 19-26— After spending two pages moving the MC from one ship to another thanks to walls of verbosity, Stanton gets on a hospital ship, gets fitted for cybernetic limbs and has her first PTSD nightmare. She decides against getting realistic flesh-like sleeves for the limbs because “she wanted people to see the cost of war.”
Stanton exercises, then strikes up a conversation with another woman (nach) with cybernetic legs named Eccleston. The waterboarding session that is their conversation goes on for over 1,600 words and is torturous in its banality. It’s also when we find out, three chapters in, that Stanton has red eyes, a feature common to people on her home planet. Tomlinson takes almost five thousand words and an entire chapter to cover ground that would have taken Mike Resnick maybe fifteen hundred, but Mike Resnick he fucking ain’t.
But what’s worse is that by now, the shallowness of Tomlinson’s talent truly becomes apparent.
Stanton is an acerbic, sarcastic bitch. Liska is an acerbic, sarcastic bitch. Stanton’s superiors were acerbic sarcastic bitches (and I’m including the numerous they/thems thus far). Eccleston, while slightly more amiable thanks to her sympathy to Stanton’s plight, still comes across as snarky and sarcastic for most of the time, though her brand of sarcasm is clearly meant to be a substitute for charisma. Almost anyone who does not fit this mold exists to be intimidated by someone who is an acerbic, sarcastic bitch or simply killed outright.
Tomlinson’s monodimensional character writing is on naked display by now. He cannot write a character that comes across any other way. He is incapable of writing people of different worldviews, motivations or thought processes than his own and not portray them as wrong somehow. His heroes are always zoomerified children conveyed by the stunted imagination of a fortysomething year old Disney-brained man perpetually in arrested development. Every character introduced up to this point (every female character anyway) feels like the same character. He cannot write.
Chapter Four
Page 27— Woah, hold on, some actually good writing! Tomlinson’s solution to FTL travel is for ships to travel via vessel-encompassing pocket warp fields called “Alcubierre bubbles”, named after Mexican theoretical physicist who proposed a means of faster-than-light travel that (at least in theory) doesn’t violate laws of physics. This is actually pretty neat. The description of Stanton’s hospital ship coming into view of a massive sprawling floating navy yard is followed by an actually well-written and concise recounting of the flashpoint of man’s war against the wasps beginning with their invasion of an underguarded outpost planet and the failure of the government to take the threat seriously is all done within less than 700 words. Again, shades of the writer he could be when he sticks to the story. Consider my words eaten!
Page 28-30— Nevermind. Three paragraphs spent telling the reader that Stanton is hungry. She eventually decides on a place called The Swingin’ Door Exchange, a place verbatim copied from Pat’s own local watering hole in Milwaukee. Any appearance of alcohol in the scene is described in the kind of exquisite detail only an alcoholic could give. Nine-tenths of the chapter revolves around booze in one way or another.
Page 30— Eccleston shows up. Asks Stanton what she knows about Hexaphants. Plot kicks off in earnest 17,000 words in.
Chapter Five
Page 31— “lived experience.” From a hard-ass combat vet.
On her flight home, Stanton records a message to Puta, finally gives the reader the plot: a herd of six-legged alien elephants that are viewed as sacred by the wasps needs guarding from poachers who hunt them for their tusks. Money’s good, but Stanton doesn’t want to work for the bugs. Of course we know she does, but why should this cause her inner turmoil? You didn’t stick around to watch your squadmates get a proper burial, you miserable bitch, why have qualms over taking blood money?
I’m calling it now that this is our first clue that somehow we’ll eventually find out the bugs were ackshually the good guys all along. We’ll see. Pat tries especially hard to adopt feminine cadence here and fails spectacularly, which surprised me coming from such an effeminate man.
Page 32— We learn Stanton has daddy issues. Pat She talks about a sandwich shop for half a page.
Page 33— Pat spends half of this page giving utterly unnecessary details about Stanton’s home planet, so much so that I had to stop myself from skipping whole paragraphs. Details about its climate, rotation and economy, none of which ultimately matter, could have been handled in a few sentences. But Pat will never use three words when thirty will do. More words=better writing to Pat.
Pat steals the “Good for you! Mobile Infantry made me the man I am today!” scene from Starship Troopers when Stanton meets a recruit. Pat overexplains her ship going through a landing sequence, which causes Stanton to have a flashback.
Page 36— Once landed, Stanton eats some more and ignores a few dirty beggars that Tomlinson curiously takes great pains to describe as Mexican. Pat describes how shitty and rundown Stanton’s neighborhood is. Meeting her parents, Dad greets her unenthusiastically, and frankly from what I’ve seen of his daughter, I don’t blame him. Mom seems sweet. Bitch that Stanton is, she’s annoyed her mother has the audacity the be shocked that her baby girl is missing limbs:
“Erin! We’re so glad to—” Her mother grasped Stanton’s new forearm and her face went from joy to ice. She rolled up her daughter’s sleeve and set her jaw.
“What did they do to my baby girl?”
“They didn’t do anything, mom.” Stanton pulled her sleeve back down. “It was my choice.”
“I’m marching right down to that recruiter’s office tomorrow morning and so help me—”
“Mom, it’s fine. Really. Can you just be glad I’m home?”
Page 37— Stanton finds out her folks rented out her room to the town pervert:
“We rented out your room,” her father said.
“You did what?”
“We didn’t think you’d be back for another year, and we needed the script.”
“To who?”
“The Bixby boy, from just down the street,” her mother said helpfully. “You remember him, he was in your class.”
“Sven Bixby?” Stanton said in blanched-face horror. “You rented out my childhood bedroom to the boy I caught sniffing my gym socks during my birthday party?”
“That was a long time ago, dear.”
Page 38— Stanton gets angry, stays angry to such a degree that she refuses to sleep on the couch and leaves the parents she hasn’t seen in years mere minutes after coming home (huh, abruptly abandoning family, weird). The solution to her problem? Booze! But on the way to the nearest bar she has another flashback freak-out and assaults a local news reporter approaching her that she thought was a wasp and gets arrested. This tracks, as Pat might say, because he’s not a big fan of the fuzz.
Page 39— Stanton wakes up in a cell (a 6’x8’, stlaker), and describes the spartan accommodations. An actual good bit of humor occurs in the line, “It would all weigh heavily on her star rating at the end of the day.”
Page 40— Stanton’s cybernetics have been confiscated, though being consigned to a wheelchair doesn’t stop her from mouthing off to cops just trying to do their job. She’s sent up to the office of the planetary Governor, who is the only person so far to get a detailed description. See if you can guess why:
“You seem, unbothered by your circumstances,” the voice echoed slightly. How big was this office?
“Just waiting for the other shoe to drop.”
Footsteps from her left approached the far end of the desk. A woman, late middle-age, shoulder-length brown hair giving way to the silver of trumpets at the temples, rich olive skin, and eyes like pools, stepped into view. “Thump.”
Stanton knew that face, if not the voice accompanying it. Few had heard it. “Governor Harris.”
Yup. And lest you think this was mere coincidence, let me remind you that in Tomlinson’s first novel The Ark, the fearless female captain of said Ark ship who stands up to the boorish male Overseer is named Kamala. Not only did he do it, he did it twice.
Page 41-42— Madame President and Stanton have a bitch-off as Harris proceeds to fill in a bit of Stanton’s backstory and tell (not show, God forbid!) via various public records what a defiant rebel outsider Stanton’s always been, and that her decision to join the military was just to get out of juvie, all while Stanton scowls. Turns out the news reporter Stanton assaulted was a beloved local figure who coaches little league or some shit (again, we’re told, not shown), and Harris is concerned because Stanton having public PTSD freak outs are bad optics. She’s convinced the reporter will, for some reason, go on a dirt-digging crusade against a mentally unstable local war veteran and use everything he can find about her to wage a smear campaign out of sheer spite, which makes sense to Tomlinson and absolutely no one else because the only kind of persona Tomlinson knows how to write is that of an irredeemable revenge-driven obstinate scumbag.
I’m not sure if Pat realizes (what am I saying, of course he doesn’t realize) how he’s casting the stand-in for his real-life political crush here; one approach to this problem might be to have the reporter and Stanton privately reconcile (the decent thing to do anyway), then make a very public virtue signaling display announcing that she’ll make sure Stanton and vets like her are never left behind by the system again while laying the fault at the feet of the opposing party. Then, have Stanton present among the honored guests for the signing of umpteen Executive Orders promising veterans better access to care, forming new oversight departments, etc., etc., etc.
OR, or, Pat could have actually turned this little exchange into an evergreen critique of the absolute tragedy that is the Department of Veterans Affairs under any given administration, if he had any forethought or empathy towards those not like him, but Tomlinson’s thoughts are rarely ever any further out than his next tweet.
Instead, Pat has his strong, woman of color executive leader acknowledge that returning vets losing their marbles is an open secret, but they at least have the decency to do it out of the public eye, and sees the problem as basically taking care of itself:
“You’re not the first service member to come home and deal with this condition, Lance Corporal. But you are the first to choose such a publicly spectacular arena to showcase it. Most just have a private little freak out in the pits far away from the limelight.”
Not a good look there, Pat. In a decision that makes absolutely zero sense, a recurring prime mover of this plot since page one and the foremost tell of a weak writer, Harris tells Stanton the sensible thing to do is to exile her to her world of choice and sweep the whole thing under the rug.
It’s probably worth noting here that at no point during this entire story, does anyone prescribe Stanton meds or therapy. I get Stanton not wanting to take meds, she’d probably say she didn’t need them simply because she’s prideful and might see them as weakness, and I understand that her flashbacks and episodes are major elements of her character’s struggle to acclimate to civilian life. But no one even so much as offers. Even when the governor of her home planet sees her having psychotic breaks in public, her go-to inclination is to simply bury the problem as quickly as possible. Even when she’s on the hospital ship, no one offers her anything more than a sedative to help her sleep.
If Pat were a better writer, he wouldn’t have missed this opportunity to give his MC depth and pathos by having her struggle with the decision of possibly trading chemical dependency for mental peace. But, as has been well established by now, Pat is not a better writer than that. Hell, Tomlinson is not a better author than Quan Millz, author of This Hoe Got Roaches in Her Crib and Tax Season THOTs.
Chapter Seven
Pages 44-48— Stanton lands on “Space Australia”, a backwater where the Hexaphant preserve is.. Starts the chapter wanting to drink, ends it wanting to eat. Meets the crew of scientists she’ll be paired with. 90% worldbuilding and detail, minimal character formation, although at least the scientists on the research team don’t immediately come across as assholes.
Chapter Eight
Page 48-53— Chapter starts with Stanton being hungry. Pat’s talent for turns of phrase is showcased by Stanton referring to coffee as ‘square dog’ (because in the Corps it comes in a box and tastes like dog shit’), while having the commissary’s cook use the term ‘life hack’.
Stanton chats with one of the scientists over breakfast about the molecular makeup of the local flora. Scene then switches to a briefing room that was not like, swamp ass hot. Lead scientist briefs the team in the most Earth First way possible, that the wasps are allowing the human scientists to study the planet in exchange for the several ex-military members of the team to work protecting the hexaphants from poachers that are hunting them for their ivory. This is bad because the wasps need to be able to hunt them down since they’re seen as sacred and used as trophies in rites of passage. Pat, in an astounding display of awareness, actually acknowledges this paradox in the final line.
Final Rating: Prison, Stalker
This partial manuscript is 30,000 words that feels like 80,000, yet there is nothing here. With the exception of the scientists introduced near the end, absolutely no one in this story is the least bit likable. Decisions that make no sense are all that move the plot forward. The dialogue, even the omniscient narration, is saturated with a sense of snark that grows tiresome quickly. Pat “Paint Balloon” Tomlinson’s attempts at military jargon, be it formal or informal, ring inauthentic at every turn.
This whole thing could have been cut by half and not missed any of the essential plot points, but you WILL read every tedious bit of dross Tomlinson has come up with for worldbuilding details that inevitably prove unimportant. He is utterly incapable of word economy. There were bright spots here and there, and if he took a few pages from the school of pulp writing, he’d learn to trim a lot of fat and zero in on details that still make for rich detailing and brisk pacing. This of course is to say nothing of the fact that he constantly feels compelled to include current day phrases and political allusions that will date the work quickly.
It is a cardinal sin for a writer to waste a reader’s time. Tomlinson seems to feel he is owed such. Keep in mind, this was written after he’d published six other novels, and his writing seems to have actually devolved. Even if he’d managed not to go insane on social media and destroyed every ounce of industry capital he’d ever had, I doubt Herd Immunity would have made it out of the slush piles.
Thank you for taking one for the team!
I made to the beginning of chapter 4 before I gave up. Didn't think I was interested in this awful book and I was right.