Camouflage
by Joe Haldeman
Summary
Two immortal shapeshifters have been on Earth for a very long time and do not know about each other.
The changeling arrived a million years ago, spent most of that time in the ocean as various sea creatures, came ashore, and has been learning to be human ever since. It has been a man, a woman, a soldier on the Bataan Death March, a graduate student, and it has become genuinely decent by accumulation, mostly by being hurt often enough to understand what hurt is.
The chameleon arrived much later, in the pre Christian era, and has learned nothing. It changes shape in seconds, kills whatever inconveniences it, and enjoys that. Its long project is to find and destroy anything else like itself.
In 2019 an artefact is recovered from a trench off Samoa: a dense metallic object that no instrument can scratch and that predates every human civilisation. Both of them come to look at it, which is the first time they have ever been in the same place.
Haldeman cuts between the artefact investigation and the two creatures' separate centuries, so the novel is half a laboratory procedural and half a strange biography.
The changeling's Bataan chapters are the strongest writing in it: a creature that cannot be killed choosing to stay in a body being marched to death, because it has decided it wants to understand what the men beside it are going through.
Around three hundred pages, spare and quick, with Haldeman's usual flat unshowy prose and short chapters.
Best for readers who want a first contact story told as a character study, and a genuinely unusual argument that morality is something a mind can arrive at simply by living among people long enough.
Historical Context & Significance
Camouflage won the 2005 Nebula Award for Best Novel and the James Tiptree Jr Award, now the Otherwise Award, which recognises fiction that expands understanding of gender.
The Tiptree was for the changeling. A being that has spent a century learning to be human by inhabiting bodies of both sexes, and that eventually settles on a preference, gave the jury a way into questions the field usually handles more heavily.
Joe Haldeman had already won the Hugo and Nebula together twice, for The Forever War and Forever Peace, and he taught writing at MIT for more than thirty years while producing a novel roughly every other year. He was named a Science Fiction Writers of America Grand Master in 2010.