Der ewige Krieg. Roman. (original 1974; edition 2000)

In the distant future (1997), the government conscripts the best and brightest young men and women to fight a SPACE WAR against mysterious aliens. Without knowing any of the publishing information about this book, you’d still be able to tell it was written by a Vietnam vet in the mid-70s. The government is preposterously Machiavellian, the military is utterly inept, and the war is completely arbitrary. Think of The Forever War as a less subtle, less funny, less meaningful sci-fi version of Catch-22.

That being said, this novel is a good read. Though the basic plot is the same thing you see over and over again in militaristic science fiction, Haldeman adds a few elements to keep it interesting. The science, in particular, I found very engaging. In this universe, it turns out Einstein was completely right and time starts to do very strange things when objects travel near the speed of light. As a consequence, personnel on starships come back from their missions decades and decades after they first set out, even though it has only been a few months from their perspective. This also means that when the soldiers encounter an enemy, they have no way to tell what “time” those aliens come from; they could be from hundreds of years in the past and have antique weapons, or they can be from the future and possess unheard of technology.

Haldeman uses relativity as a brilliant plot device to trace human and cultural evolution over the course of thousands of years. The protagonist is in a constant state of future shock because whenever he arrives back at base or Earth, what he finds is unrecognizable.

I’m more than a little iffy about how Haldeman treats women and homosexuality in this text. They have a presence at least; hurray! Women are part of the military and no one seems to think this is exceptional or strange. Sexuality is out in the open and encouraged; also hurrah! For a while, I was very pleased. However, then Haldeman drops this bomb:

“… then unleashed Stargate’s eighteen sex-starved men on our women, compliant and promiscuous by military custom (and law), but desiring nothing so much as sleep on solid ground.”

Now, it is possible that Haldeman is trying to critique this policy, but I certainly could not find any evidence. He uses the protagonist as a mouthpiece to rail against all the injustices the government and military commits, and he says only positive things about this law. Therefore, it makes me wonder if Haldeman actually doesn’t see anything wrong with that arrangement.

Secondly, after the protagonist returns from a long journey, he finds out that the government has conditioned (via suggestion) everyone into being homosexual in order to control population. There are some homophobic comments from the protagonist, but he eventually accepts them as essentially no different from himself. What I really objected to here is the implication that there is some “gay switch” that can easily be flipped on or off in people’s brains.

But unfortunately these are things you have to deal with when reading books from the 70s.

The prose in this book is terrible: really choppy writing and no style. Also, there are a ton of grammar errors and a bunch of just straight-up typos. I know I read a first edition, but COME ON.

Overall, I still recommend this book. It is definitely part of science fiction canon and after reading it I can see this work has inspired many imitations.

… this review got a lot longer than I meant it to be. OH WELL.

4/5 misunderstood aliens ( )

I always felt badly that I had never read this classic book, that I was somehow not really an SF fan because of it. Eventually, guilt or shame brought it to the top of my in-pile, and I dove in. Now part of me wishes I had simply left it there.

The premise is that humanity of early 21st century is at war with a far-flung alien race. We’re not quite sure how it started, but it looks like they shot first. The only FTL is via some kind of wormhole, but there is plenty of slower-than-light travel to and from, and much of that travel is at relativistic speeds.

So, rather than leaving it as a pure space-navy war, we decide we need some boots on the ground. So who do we recruit as our cannon-fodder? Only the best and brightest will do. So we skim off the cream of our intellectual crop and send them off to battle. If only their commanding officers were as smart.

Which is leads me to the main complaint about this book. The people in charge were always extremely short-sighted and downright stupid. I recognize that to some extent this is a screed against the U.S. political/military leadership from the U.S.-Vietnam war, but it got really annoying as to just how stupid they were making these folks.

How stupid? Well, they planned their training with the expectation that half of the trainees would be killed or permanently maimed during the training. They also sent them on missions over the years (in fact, centuries) where the expectation was an average of 66% casualties per mission. But it’s not like we were stuck in the jungles, trying not to kill too many civilians. Nope, we were fighting over deserted rocks. What part of orbital bombardment did they miss?

And then there was the whole Malthusian situation back on Earth. I know there was a lot of concern about the rapid rise of population back in the 1970’s, but even growing up with that, I was never all that worried. The concern, as originally laid out by Thomas Malthus in the late 1700’s, was that our population would outstrip our food production, and that the only ways to combat this were draconian birth control of the less desirable or poorer populations or outright war and starvation to bring the population back down to a manageable level.

Some of offshoots of this back on Earth during the Forever War were an economy based entirely on calories. Then there were some civil wars and lawlessness that brought the population down. And then we had enforced and universal homosexuality. Maybe it’s because I now live in a world where most demographers realize we are not headed towards a Malthusian catastrophe, but frankly, I found most of this to be ridiculous.

Perhaps it’s unfair of me to lay these criticisms on Haldeman’s 1970’s book, but its repetitive message that our leaders are stupid and we are all doomed was very tiring. I prefer more optimistic futurists because instead of complaining about all the insurmountable problems facing us, they tend to propose the solutions that actually solve those problems.

And my final complaint about the book was that the resolution of the war was very much deus ex machina. After centuries, humanity transformed into another form that was able to communicate with the warmongering aliens. No, we can’t explain to you how the communication works, but now that it does, everything is just fine. The war was a silly misunderstanding, and now everyone can live happily ever after. We thank you for your centuries of pointless sacrifice.

About the only thing I did find worthwhile in the book was the realities of relativistic travel, of skipping forward into the future. Friends and family age and die. Technology and society march on in unexpected directions. The realities of life, death, and injury change from one trip to the next. That, at least, was interesting.

But by and large, I did not enjoy the book. ( )

one of the best scifi works ive encountered. the author clearly put a lot of thought in this. it seems he tried to shoot holes in whatever futuristic vision he came up with, and as a result, concluded with refined and believable scenarios. very admirable writing style. ( )

Concept was kind of fun, but the plot seemed tagged on. I can of course see how the book can be read as an allegory of the Vietnam war, but its significance as such is very minimal. And what is the deal with the constant talk about homosexuality? ( )

Listened to this on audio and loved it. It was more technically oriented than Scalzi's Old Man's War series, but the characters shared the same flavor. Can't wait to read another by Haldeman! ( )