The Forever War
For some reason I had never read Joe Haldeman’s The Forever War, and recently decided to remedy that. Like most classic sci-fi novels, it’s a quick read, much shorter than most contemporary novels. It’s often been called a Vietnam veteran’s response to Robert A. Heinlein’s Starship Troopers. Haldeman himself disputes that, although he admits it’s heavily inspired by Vietnam, and overall much more antiwar than Heinlein’s story.
This novel originally came out in the early 1970s and is very much a product of its time.
William Mandela is a physics student in the 1990s drafted into the United Nations army in a war against an alien species: the “Taurans”. Unlike in previous wars, a high IQ is part of the criteria. The military wants elite fighters. Women are included, so in this imagined near future military, it’s a mixed force, with roughly half female.
As …
The Forever War
For some reason I had never read Joe Haldeman’s The Forever War, and recently decided to remedy that. Like most classic sci-fi novels, it’s a quick read, much shorter than most contemporary novels. It’s often been called a Vietnam veteran’s response to Robert A. Heinlein’s Starship Troopers. Haldeman himself disputes that, although he admits it’s heavily inspired by Vietnam, and overall much more antiwar than Heinlein’s story.
This novel originally came out in the early 1970s and is very much a product of its time.
William Mandela is a physics student in the 1990s drafted into the United Nations army in a war against an alien species: the “Taurans”. Unlike in previous wars, a high IQ is part of the criteria. The military wants elite fighters. Women are included, so in this imagined near future military, it’s a mixed force, with roughly half female.
As a morale boosting measure, the recruits in training are encouraged, even required, to have regular and promiscuous sex with their colleagues. Pot smoking is common and seen as just another recreational drug. And the automatic “Sir, yes sir!” chorus of obedience in previous generations is replaced with a “F— you, sir!” response, repeated with the same lack of enthusiasm.
After some training in Missouri, the recruits are shipped to a planet in the outer solar system called “Charon” (not to be confused with the moon of Pluto discovered years after this story was written). Here they learn to use an armored exoskeleton suit so prevalent in military sci-fi. The training is grueling and dangerous. Several recruits are killed. Eventually they graduate and are sent to their first posting.
Interstellar travel in this universe happens via “collapsars”, a type of naturally occurring wormhole. However the collapsars are often a substantial distance from local solar systems or each other, requiring months of travel time, typically reaching relativistic speeds. The result is that while the troops spend months in transit, years are passing at the bases and on Earth. The battles all seem to happen in solar systems near collapsar transit points.
The Taurans, when first encountered, don’t seem like very good fighters, but they learn quickly, and the war becomes a long slog.
When Mandella first gets back to base, he discovers that decades have passed. But he, his girlfriend, and many others are given a chance to cash out their backpay and return to civilian life, although they are warned that a lot has changed on Earth. When they take the cash out option, they get back to Earth in 2024, and discover that it is a dystopia, with overpopulation, sky high crime rates, society breaking down, and widespread misery. Mandella and his girlfriend eventually reenlist.
As the war drags on and the decades and centuries pile up, Earth becomes increasingly alien from the view of the older soldiers. Governments on Earth begin to encourage homosexuality as a means to keep the population under control, and eventually make it mandatory. Mandella, as one of the longest surviving soldiers, finds himself considered a sexual deviant by the new recruits.
There are some pretty good action and battle scenes in the book, but one theme throughout seems to be that military often doesn’t know what it’s doing. Also that it’s not the soldier’s friend. And that the future is going to be very strange by our standards, starting with the army a few years in the future, and getting progressively weirder as the story progresses.
Reading older sci-fi is always an interesting experience. In this book, we get to see a 1970s vision of what the 1990s and 2020s would be like, and how dominated that vision is by the preoccupations of 60s and 70s culture. Certainly our 2020s is far from perfect, but it’s a picnic compared to the nightmare presented in the book. Something for us to keep in mind when contemplating the predictions made today.
Obviously this book isn’t going to be everyone’s cup of tea, but I found it an interesting ride, worth considering if you’re looking for classic sci-fi to read.
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