Hardcover, 54 pages
English language
Published Nov. 19, 1991 by Nbm Pub Co.
Not bad... It is especially good if you are seeking a decent explanation and examples of time dilation. Otherwise the story-line is quite pedestrian by today's standards for good space operas.
Great book. Listened to the audiobook, which was very well done.
Quaint but good
Despite the dated Gay Panic of the main character, who was supposed to have been born around the same time as me, the clumsy 70's-inspired dystopia that was supposed to be 2007, and the holes in the overall premise (how would you even strategize such a war without faster-than-light communication? why was there any ground combat at all? and so on), the lesson of the futility of war on this or any other scale is an appropriate one for a book finished on Memorial Day.
Great book, I loved the story, the idea, the characters, the ending. I thought I would be put off by a book about war, about soldiers, but once again I turns out there is so much more to the story. Really really worth a read!
I had high hopes for this book, as a winner of the Nebula and Hugo, but to my mind, it neatly encapsulates all that 'literary' types hate about genre fiction.
Haldeman took a serious theme -- the Vietnam war -- and then wrote a story around it that even for the loose standards of science fiction is poorly structured and written. I found his characters weak and two-dimensional. The story line was clearly contrived to allow him to speculate about what the future might look like. And, although it may have been acceptable for the time, he has strangely sexist and homophobic strands in the book that do nothing to help his primary theme, other than to titillate the readers (who, let's face it, are young males or older military enthusiasts).
What also amazed me was that even though [b:Starship Troopers|17214|Starship Troopers|Robert A. Heinlein|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1227644068s/17214.jpg|2534973] was written two decades previously, Haldeman …
I had high hopes for this book, as a winner of the Nebula and Hugo, but to my mind, it neatly encapsulates all that 'literary' types hate about genre fiction.
Haldeman took a serious theme -- the Vietnam war -- and then wrote a story around it that even for the loose standards of science fiction is poorly structured and written. I found his characters weak and two-dimensional. The story line was clearly contrived to allow him to speculate about what the future might look like. And, although it may have been acceptable for the time, he has strangely sexist and homophobic strands in the book that do nothing to help his primary theme, other than to titillate the readers (who, let's face it, are young males or older military enthusiasts).
What also amazed me was that even though [b:Starship Troopers|17214|Starship Troopers|Robert A. Heinlein|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1227644068s/17214.jpg|2534973] was written two decades previously, Haldeman has not updated any of the major concepts from that book. I was wishing throughout that he had taken some of his interesting 'hard' SF ideas and just turned them into separate novels or short stories. Certainly his way of analysing time dilation effects was really well done.
I appreciate that some of the heavy-handed writing was deliberate: e.g., we never get to understand who or what the Taurans are, which is a reference to the 'men in the black pyjamas', and that I am perhaps a little young to appreciate the true horror of Vietnam.
Comparing this book to Catch-22 is a bit of a stretch in my mind. It certainly seems to pale in comparison to the ground-breaking [b:The Left Hand of Darkness|18423|The Left Hand of Darkness|Ursula K. Le Guin|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1166913055s/18423.jpg|817527].
