Note: I’m not a big reader outside of mandatory stuff that I read for school. The last fiction novel that I read on my own was BioShock: Rapture, which, given the fact that I have a fucking BioShock TATTOO on my forearm, didn’t surprise many people at the time.
That said, I’ve been on a sort of book kick lately, & The Forever War was one of the novels that I just ordered.
In one of my classes that just ended, one of the assigned readings was Joe Haldeman’s original short story “Hero,” which he later expanded into the novel. I was absolutely enthralled with the short story, especially its subtle digs at the Vietnam War, which, at the time he wrote it, Haldeman had just finished fighting in. It’s my understanding that The Forever War takes a similar tack - IE, using military sci-fi as a stand-in for VW criticism - in order to broadly depict its narrative.
I obviously haven’t read it yet, so don’t go too heavy on the spoiler talk. That said, for those who’ve read it, what did you think? Did you enjoy it? Why or why not?
Haldeman is a good writer, and The Forever War is one of his best. It’s a little dated in terms of it’s timeline and physics somewhat, but not too jarring if you keep that in mind.
Forever Free seems like it should be a sequel, but it isn’t. Although it revisits some of the same themes. Forever Peace actually is a sequel, and it starts off interesting then goes completely off the rails.
The Martian is better. Best sci-fi novel I’ve read in at least 5 years. Sheesh, I’m probably sounding like a shill, but it’s that good.
The reason, I’d say, is that it simultaneously has
1. A gripping plot and a well written protagonist
2. It’s as hard sci-fi as sci-fi gets. No ray guns here. Most of the events in the book could really potentially happen.
I met Joe Haldeman at the University of Maryland when I was a student. He gave a reading of the book he was working on (Buying Time maybe?). His brother Jack was there too. I don’t remember why at this point. Joe was an alumni of UMD but at the time I believe he worked at MIT.
One thing I remember him mentioning was that when he wrote The Forever War memories of Viet Nam were too vivid for him to write explicit violence. That surprised me because I remembered the book as having good action sequences. I went back and reread it and he was right. The violence was mostly implied and not directly described. There was little or no gore. it takes a lot of talent to gloss over the violence of a war novel and still make the action seem real and immediate.
You might want to check out the Wikipedia page for The Forever War, skipping the plot summary for the Editions section. Apparently, what’s being published today is not the same work that was released in the 1970s. A middle section cut for space has been put back and the work has been unexpurgated. I didn’t know this - I read the original in 1975 and haven’t looked at it since - and I don’t know how it affects the value. The big issue is that you can’t read a Vietnam book today like I read it in 1975, when the war had just ended and had been the center of my political existence for six years.
The Forever Waris Haldeman’s career. Is there another Grand Master level writer still working whose career is so identified with one book? How many people can name another novel of Haldeman’s outside the series? He’s a very good writer, no question, but most of his better output has been short fiction. And he was lucky, as well. 1975 was a weak year for the field, allowing him to sweep all the awards. The publication date of the book is officially January 1975, but it was available in 1974 and some say it should have competed in that year. That would have put it again the award-sweeper, Ursula K. LeGuin’s The Dispossessed as well as Thomas M. Disch’s 334, Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said by Philip K. Dick and The Mote In God’s Eye, by Larry Niven & Jerry Pournelle. Could it have won over all those? Extremely doubtful. Without any awards it would have been another very good novel just like many others from those glory years for the field. Timing is everything.
I remember it as a good if not great book. The digs didn’t seem so subtle to me but it’s a solid book and interesting take on the challenges of fighting a way at relativistic speeds. The characterization seemed weak to me. It’s been a looooong time since I read it though. If you enjoyed the short story I bet you’ll like it. I’ve read both. Since you already bought the book anyway… let us know.
I read it a long time ago. I thought it was well written and explored how the world would change over the decades that the combatants were gone, but it’s not among those I would consider the best ever.
Forever War was great, I read it back in the early 80s. Though I think it works better if you read Starship Troopers somewhere along the way. I reread it maybe 6 years ago and it wasn’t as good but that happens.
Heck, I can. I read his books after Forever War as they came out. MIndbridge was an interesting teleportation + telepathy novel – the only one I ever read thast came up with mathematical formulas governing the teleportation (with graphs and asll). The short story collection All my Sins Remembered. The collection Infinite Dreams and There is no Darkness, co-asuthored with his brother. And I read his two Star Trek novels, done before doing so was quite as formulaic as it later got. I never did read his Worlds trilogy.
I didn’t know about the revisions to Forever War. Now I’m going to have to look that up. I do agree that the book was a product of its time.
People have said that this contrasts with Heinlein’s Starship Troopers, but they don’t say why – the exo-suit technology seems to be practically identical, as does the setting of high-tech soldiers fighting against an alien enemy. But Forever War is best described as Starship Troopers written AFTER Vietnam. Instead of Heinlein’s deep trust and faith in the military, Haldeman writes like a man who’s been through the system and sees it as less than perfect, and quite capable of screwing up.
AS couple of years ago I was at a dinner given by the MIT Club, at MIT. Haldeman, who was a Visiting Professor in the Humanities DEpartment at MIT at the time, was the featured speaker. I think I was the only one in the room who’d actually read any of his books, so when the Q&A period came up, and there was an ambarrassing silence, I took it upon myself to ask him about Forever War.
I read The Forever War maybe 20 years ago, but very much enjoyed it. Hope you will too - I can’t really say how it’s aged, since it was so long ago, but I thought it was great and still have fond memories of it.
The sequel, not so much, and it can be skipped, but that doesn’t detract from the original.
One point about The Forever War that a lot of its readers miss:
Travel through a collapsar does NOT send you into the future. It is instantaneous. However, collapsars are not ubiquitous throughout space. The nearest collapsar might be light-years from your current position. It takes time to cross those light-years using only normal, sub-light acceleration and deceleration. The main characters keep coming back to a world changed from when they left, not because of collapsar travel per se, but because they’re travelling so close to the speed of light for most of their trip that time dilation becomes important.
When I read it, my thought was that Haldeman had some talent, but that it needed a great deal of refinement before he’d be able to write anything worthy of the Hugo or Nebula. The book is just clumsy in so many ways. Most glaring is that he apparently has no clue just how short a decade is, and that there’s no way that the technological or social changes he posited could conceivably have taken hold as quickly as he has them (the book opens something like 15 years after the year the original short story was written). But there are also inherent contradictions in the premise: The FTL jumps are described as both instantaneous, too short a time to measure, and taking many years (special relativity isn’t enough to give him the time dilation effect he wanted, so he dumped most of the excess time on the jumps). And the characters, especially the high brass, are just too stupid to have possibly been able to survive to adulthood: Why in the nine Hells are the suits so perfectly insulated that if your coolant fins are damaged you’ll die of heatstroke on Pluto? Why, similarly, are the suit servos so strong that they’ll rip your own limbs off? Or the light amplification goggles so bright that they’ll literally burn your eyes out? Or, when what’s-his-name and their squad try to capture aliens to bring back to the researchers at HQ, what researchers? We’ve already established that all of the society’s high IQs are off on the front lines being used as cannon fodder.
Oh, and there’s also a laser cannon late in the book which has a power expressed in “megawatts per second”, and any competent SF writer should know better than that.
EDIT:
That might have been a sensible way to set it up, but it’s not what Haldeman actually did. The nearest collapsar to Earth is only a couple of months’ travel out, at accelerations of only a few g. And he explicitly says that most of the time dilation is due to being in the close vicinity of collapsars.
One novel, the rest collections - he was better as short fiction, as I said. Star Trek novels don’t count as his. Well, not to me.
Here’s why.
Although it was even more than that. Heinlein venerated a societal system in which the military was a shining exemplar of Americanism. Haldeman - and every other Nam writer this side of Staff Sgt. Barry Sadler - noted that the American system that could develop a Vietnam was itself stinking and the military not merely reflected that but exacerbated it. AFAIK, Heinlein never acknowledged that the military and the America which it represented could ever be anything other than the one he saw in WWII and never understood the distance that put him from his younger audience.
I mean, I was there in Kansas City in 1976 when he was Guest of Honor at Midamerican and faced an audience who practically wanted to carry him on their shoulders every step - and managed to turn the room against him by his attitude. Talk about “Gulf.”
That was the world that The Forever War appeared in. Haldeman had cred; Heinlein would have recognized that. But I’m sure that at the time - pre-operation - he didn’t recognize why most of its audience read it differently than he did.
I read it a few years ago and greatly enjoyed it. The science, etc, was less important to me.
What really resonated me was the feeling of “man out of his place” due to his military service. I noticed this feeling when I returned from my two deployments to Iraq. I was only gone 5/6 months at time, but those months are spent in a bubble. Yes, we had tv and the internet, but you still feel separated from the outside world. Going home was always a shock.
The science is wonky. So’s the sociology. The idea that conscripted female soldiers must put out for complete strangers who’ve been without sex too long is frankly disturbing, and would NOT fly today.
But one of the themes of the book – the idea of conscription to the point where The Man can simply take your whole life away and use it as They see fit – 'cuz Patriotism – is a strong one. It was stronger back when there was a draft. And the book just SCREAMS “Vietnam,” for all that there’s no black pajamas or rice paddies to be found.
You’ve surrounded it with qualifiers that reject obvious other candidates, but I do have to point out that plenty of writers are best or essentially only known for one work, often a short story instead of a novel.
So, leaving out the Grand Master Still Writing part, how many people can name another work by Daniel Keyes (Flowers for Algernon/Charly) without looking it up on isfdb? Stanley Weinbaum is basically remembered for a Martian Odyssey. How many folks know the name of even one other story off the top of their heads? How many know he wrote a sequel to Odyssey? How many know he wrote a novel (The Black Flame*? Cordwainer Smith is known for his short stories. He wrote one novel – Norstrilia
And so on, and so on, ad nauseam. I can keep this up. I’m sure that you can. And Haldeman has turned out other novels, as well as a lot of shorts. So it is with most writers. I don’t know the rules of what gets to be famous, and wish I did.
Not to hijack this discussion, but I couldn’t let that pass.
mrAru once commented that it was always odd coming home after a long [3 or 4 month] deployment back in the day before instant email on submarines. He was still involved in whatever conversations he was having before they left while those of us on shore had gone on. It remained fresh in his mind because he had time to think about it while we had other people to interact with and all he had was the guys on the sub and their current conversations [we had been discussing whether or not certain friends should have kids or not.]
