I’ve read The Forever War several times over the years and still think it’s quite good. I’ve read most (not all) of Haldeman’s other novels and short story collections, and he’s definitely not a one-trick pony. Quite a talented writer.
The Forever War sequels don’t measure up, however, IMHO, except for “A Separate War” (a short story focusing on what Marygay was up to during Mandella’s last mission). It’s very good and worth a look for any fan of the original book.
I also recommend John Scalzi’s Old Man’s War for anyone who enjoyed Starship Troopers and The Forever War. A witty, wry and worthy successor.
Read the first two - Worlds and Worlds Apart comprise a story that, IMHO, is every bit as compelling as The Forever War.
But skip the third. At the end of the second book, it’s clear that you’ve hit the end of the story.
In the intro to a story in one of his short story collections, Haldeman mentions a commitment that a publisher refused to let him out of. I’m convinced that the third book, Worlds Enough and Time, is that commitment - that they’d signed a contract for Haldeman to write a trilogy, but when the story came to a full stop at the end of the second book, the publisher still insisted on the third book.
Nothing’s wrong with the third book, it’s an OK but perfectly forgettable read, that’s all. It’s just unnecessary. The story arc of the first two books was over already.
The most dated concept for me was that you could turn off someone’s homosexuality by mental conditioning. It was also implied that the entire populace was turned homosexual by the same sort of mental conditioning.
I did, and for what I considered to be a good reason.
You are, of course, correct that many other writers in the field are known mostly for one book. But your examples are a minimum of 50 years old, and that was a wholly different era. The rules changed. First in the early 60s when a career in paperback novels became financially feasible, and then again in the 90s when the field became driven by series and short stories are increasingly peripheral.
Grand Master is an honor bestowed by SFWA, the writer’s organization. It’s flawed in that it only goes to living writers but it’s a good first approximation of career appreciation. No one’s ever received it at 65 or younger.
The last four after Haldeman are Connie Willis, Gene Wolfe, Samuel Delany, and Larry Niven. While it would require a cruise ship to have enough cabins for their short fiction awards, they are all still mainly known for their novels. Haldeman stands out. And while it’s possible that a future Grand Master may not be known for novels - Kate Wilhelm is a possibility but she’s 86 - I’m betting it will be rare. The field is now almost purely novel-driven and all the other candidates I can think of are primarily novelists.
That’s not quite the same thing as saying that Haldeman didn’t write other good novels or that his fans wouldn’t know and defend them. I’m talking about that always elusive beastie, public perception.
Uhhh…he didn’t ‘go gay’ because he was off in deep space/time dilation. It had little to do with him being ‘too manly’.
edit: I should also point out that I like Haldeman because he (for me) promptly answers emails.
I’ve learned “Seasons” holds a special place in his heart, the rights have been picked up but seem to be in limbo. He never watched NuBSG. And he wasn’t a fan of his Star Trek novels.
They didn’t just “go gay” they were manipulated in utero to be homosexual as a method of population control. As a plot device it served to demonstrate that by this point in the story Mandella wasn’t just alienated from civilian life but that he had become alienated from the military as well. The men and women under his command thought he was weird, he barely speaks the same language as them, and by the end of the book they hate him.
What makes The Forever War a good book is that it isn’t just about Vietnam. It’s about the alienation that soldiers feel when they come back from just about any war.
I read The Forever War a couple of years ago, mainly because it’s one of those “classics” that I thought I ought to read. I liked it okay, but I’m not a big fan of military SF, and I’m a bit too young for the Vietnam stuff to really resonate with me.
The (electronic) edition I have of The Forever War includes a Foreword by Scalzi, in which he discusses how people had trouble believing that he hadn’t read The Forever War when he wrote his Old Man’s War.
I got this version of the novel, and it includes the same forward.
I’m about halfway through it right now, so I’m going to get a bit spoiler-y with a few quick thoughts:
The Science - I don’t know how “accurate” Haldeman’s depiction of science really is in this book, but a lot of it is going over my head, even if I still get the gist of all of the conventions that he has heretofore spelled out.
Time Dilation/Relativity - I LOVE this aspect of the novel & broadly think that it’s totally fascinating. I’m just getting to the point where Mandella et al. are about to return to Earth after subjectively fighting the Taurans for two years their time, when more than twenty years have passed for human on the home world. I think that this idea in itself lends to a number of fascinating story possibilities, and Haldeman has done a good job of setting that up.
Depiction of Homosexuality - Characters in the novel refer to a worldwide encouragement of homosexuality as a means of facilitating global birth control. Terms like “homolife” seem mildly insensitive to me, and are probably indicative of the time that Haldeman assembled his novel. I was born in '91 after all - long after the Vietnam War and all the presiding cultural sensibilities of the '70’s - so some of these criticisms might not ring so much for folks who actually lived through the VW era.
“Confraternity”/Male-Female Military Pairing - Haldeman describes this future military as being entirely sexually integrated, with conscripted women being required - both by custom and by law - to be promiscuous and unwilling to say “no” to a sexual advance. To be fair, this concept was laid out in the original short story, and it seemed weird to me even then; I can broadly look past it, even if, from a sociocultural POV, this is probably the part of The Forever War which mandates the greatest degree of suspension of disbelief. Again, perhaps this element of the novel is reflective of the Vietnam era in some way, but I just can’t imagine such a policy ever being adopted by any military force (let alone any advanced society).
Criticisms aside, however, this novel is quite good IMO & I’ll post more as I get further into it. I do return to school soon, though, which will compromise my free time to read in general.
Heinlein liked The Forever War so much he shook Haldeman’s hand at a con once.
The Forever War is deeply, deeply 1970s, and therefore A Vietnam War Book. It isn’t explicitly mentioned, but, at the time, it nobody had to mention it. If your tolerance for period fiction is low, or if you can’t stomach social ideas from a past generation, give this one a pass.
That said, it’s a well-written novel with an interesting premise the author at least attempts to work within. The narrator is a rare breed, the intelligent man of action who isn’t super-competent or even especially bright all the time. If he’s a simple self-insert, it should be done more often.
The social themes are of the era, the era being one of *-Lib, where * means “anything you can imagine”. The idea of homosexuality becoming not only mainstream but default was meant to be shocking, but so were co-ed dorms and the idea of LSD as a spiritual substance. Confraternity is similarly derived pretty directly from the Sexual Revolution. (“Veterans of the Sexual Revolution: Veni, Veni, Veni”) It isn’t plausible, perhaps, and the whole idea of trans people was ignored, there as elsewhere, but I give the author some points for trying. He’s a credit to his generation.
The twist was in the cards from the beginning, if you ask me, but it was handled well and wasn’t made too much of a metaphor.
I don’t remember it being legally required, but the same is expected of the men. Early on in the book, just as he’s going to bed, Mandella has a pass made at him by a female soldier. He is exhausted and would just as soon go to sleep, but feels obliged to have sex with her.
That was possible to clone-Man about a thousand years in the future and it wasn’t specified that it was done by mental conditioning. clone-Man just said that many veterans wanted to go straight in order to live better on the colony worlds that had been set aside for them and “this I can do very easily”. With a thousand years of medical advancement, it would presumably be perfectly possible to come up with some means of flipping the mental switches that cause a person to be attracted to members of the same sex. clone-Man also observes that for those who want to stay and live alongside the clone-species that they were equally welcome whether they were gay or straight, though in that society sexuality certainly had only play-value.
tl;dr: - in the far future it didn’t matter whether you were gay or straight, but if you wanted to change from one orientation to the other, “People keep asking me that question. One shot, two minutes, done and dusted. Now the next order of business…”
I would also particularly recommend Haldeman’s Mindbridge, Tool of the Trade, All My Sins Remembered, The Hemingway Hoax and Worlds (but avoid its sequels). His most recent books, The Accidental Time Machine, Old Twentieth and Camouflage, are pretty good but not great, I’d say. His short story collections *Dealing in Futures, Infinite Dreams *and A Separate War and Other Stories are a little uneven, but far, far more good than bad.
Of his short stories, I particularly liked the aforementioned “Seasons,” as well as “Lindsay and the Red City Blues,” “More Than the Sum of His Parts” and “For White Hill.” You might also look up “Counterpoint,” “Armaja Das” and my hands-down, all-time favorite Haldeman short story, “Summer’s Lease.”
