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].