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Drawing on his own war experiences, Vietnam veteran Joe Haldeman creates stunning works of science fiction. Forever Peace is not a sequel to his previous award-winning work, The Forever War, but it deals with similarly provocative issues. When it was published, Forever Peace was chosen Best Book of the Year by Publishers Weekly. It also won the coveted Hugo Award. War in the 21st century is fought by "soldier boys." Remote-controlled mechanical monsters, they are run by human soldiers who show more hard-wire their brains together to form each unit. Julian is one of these dedicated soldiers, until he inadvertently kills a young boy. Now he struggles to understand how this has changed his mind. Forever Peace is a riveting portrayal of the effects of collective consciousness, and it offers some tantalizing revelations. Narrator George Wilson's skillful performance weaves together the elements of futuristic technology with the drama of a trained soldier reconciling basic human needs. show lessTags
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sturlington Forever Peace is a thematic sequel to The Forever War.
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Forever Peace is a thematic rather than direct sequel to Haldeman's earlier novel The Forever War, dealing with some of the same issues of battle, pacifism, military technology, love, and destiny, but in a new setting with new characters. It's stuffed with ideas; overstuffed in my opinion, and loses the coherence and elegance that made The Forever War an instant classic.
Let's talk about the tech first, since it informs everything else in the novel in what is solid, if slightly dated setting-building. The star technology is the neural jack, which lets two or more humans merge into a gestalt being or experience recorded memories. The army uses this technology to create neurally linked platoons of soldierboys, remotely operated platoons of show more stealthed humanoid mechs loaded with lethal and non-lethal weaponry. The soldierboys are fighting a war, the wealthy Alliance against the poor Ngumi, over standard post-colonial issues and control of the priceless nanoforges, which have knocked all sense out of the world economy. And meanwhile, scientists are constructing a supersized particle accelerator in Jupiter orbit to probe conditions just after the Big Bang. Neural links, advanced weapons in a very familiar war, and basic physics.
Our protagonist is Julian Case. For 20 days a month, he's a physicist working on the Jupiter Project accelerator. The Army owns his ass for the other 10 days, where he commands a platoon of soldierboys in Costa Rica. Julian stumbles through jungle patrols, snatch missions, and a PR job turned massacre. War is still dangerous, even by remote control. Even though mechanics, as soldierboy operators are called, are out of the line of fire, they suffer strokes and psychological breaks at an alarming rate. Meanwhile, on civvie street Julian has a good, if undefined relationship with an older physicist (his former doctoral adviser and current boss). She decides to get a neural jack, the operation goes poorly and she's paralyzed but recovers. Under stress from everything, Julian attempts suicide, which gets him placed on leave from the army, but also leads him to two fantastic discoveries.
First, the Jupiter Project could destroy the entire universe by creating a bubble of new physical laws (think LHC eating the Earth with an artificial black hole). Second, the ten day limit on soldierboy operations is because people jacked together for much longer develop such a degree of empathy that they can no longer kill. Julian and a group of unlikely allies in the university and the academy develop a plan to kidnap large numbers of people, do neurosurgery to give them jacks, and then create a new pacifistic society by keeping them linked for a few weeks. Up against the plan are a hidden cadre of Enders, apocalypse cultists high in the military with spec-ops assassins at their command. People die, shit goes down, and in the end justice wins out.
There were some eminently cool bits: jungle war, sex while being jacked into your partner, the weird economy of the United Welfare States based on nano-replicated government-distributed goods, but it got buried in a mass of too many new ideas and plot threads. None of the characters really resolved themselves. Julian barely held together as the physicist-draftee, the reluctant warrior, but he was a weaker versi0n of Mandella from The Forever War. I couldn't tell you a thing about any of the other characters just minutes after finishing the book. There's a clear and elegant story here about the reasons why we kill and what killing does to a person, but it's buried under tons of futuristic rubble. show less
Let's talk about the tech first, since it informs everything else in the novel in what is solid, if slightly dated setting-building. The star technology is the neural jack, which lets two or more humans merge into a gestalt being or experience recorded memories. The army uses this technology to create neurally linked platoons of soldierboys, remotely operated platoons of show more stealthed humanoid mechs loaded with lethal and non-lethal weaponry. The soldierboys are fighting a war, the wealthy Alliance against the poor Ngumi, over standard post-colonial issues and control of the priceless nanoforges, which have knocked all sense out of the world economy. And meanwhile, scientists are constructing a supersized particle accelerator in Jupiter orbit to probe conditions just after the Big Bang. Neural links, advanced weapons in a very familiar war, and basic physics.
Our protagonist is Julian Case. For 20 days a month, he's a physicist working on the Jupiter Project accelerator. The Army owns his ass for the other 10 days, where he commands a platoon of soldierboys in Costa Rica. Julian stumbles through jungle patrols, snatch missions, and a PR job turned massacre. War is still dangerous, even by remote control. Even though mechanics, as soldierboy operators are called, are out of the line of fire, they suffer strokes and psychological breaks at an alarming rate. Meanwhile, on civvie street Julian has a good, if undefined relationship with an older physicist (his former doctoral adviser and current boss). She decides to get a neural jack, the operation goes poorly and she's paralyzed but recovers. Under stress from everything, Julian attempts suicide, which gets him placed on leave from the army, but also leads him to two fantastic discoveries.
First, the Jupiter Project could destroy the entire universe by creating a bubble of new physical laws (think LHC eating the Earth with an artificial black hole). Second, the ten day limit on soldierboy operations is because people jacked together for much longer develop such a degree of empathy that they can no longer kill. Julian and a group of unlikely allies in the university and the academy develop a plan to kidnap large numbers of people, do neurosurgery to give them jacks, and then create a new pacifistic society by keeping them linked for a few weeks. Up against the plan are a hidden cadre of Enders, apocalypse cultists high in the military with spec-ops assassins at their command. People die, shit goes down, and in the end justice wins out.
There were some eminently cool bits: jungle war, sex while being jacked into your partner, the weird economy of the United Welfare States based on nano-replicated government-distributed goods, but it got buried in a mass of too many new ideas and plot threads. None of the characters really resolved themselves. Julian barely held together as the physicist-draftee, the reluctant warrior, but he was a weaker versi0n of Mandella from The Forever War. I couldn't tell you a thing about any of the other characters just minutes after finishing the book. There's a clear and elegant story here about the reasons why we kill and what killing does to a person, but it's buried under tons of futuristic rubble. show less
My reactions to reading this novel in 1998. Spoilers follow.
As Haldeman makes clear in his short author’s note, this book is not a plot sequel to his The Forever War, but it is another examination of some of that book’s themes, and I think it draws some of its power through reference to that novel.
By itself, this book opens strongly. All throughout the book is Haldeman’s terse style which features the verbal hooks of irony, understatement, and a delay in revealing crucial information. He chooses a rather odd combination of first person narration by Julian Case and third person omniscient narration. The novel opens with a depiction of soldierboys, military robots operated remotely, in use. They are operated by “mechanics” show more “jacked” into them. The jack is a brain implant that allows full remote transmission and reception (though the traffic either way can be filtered) of sensory input as well as controlling the movements of the soldierboys.
The "jacks" create a subculture amongst their possessors. In the military, a platoon of soldierboys, during their ten day tour of duty, has an intimate, gestalt like connection to one another. Outside the military, people jack into records of other people’s recorded sensory experiences or have sex with fellow jack possessors. There is even a group of ex-mechanics (mostly women – the jacks can not easily be removed) who hang around as prostitutes hoping to jack with mechanics.
The war being fought is between the Ngumi and Alliance coalitions. It’s partly a race war, partly a war between the rich and poor (often a country is an official Alliance member but its poor populace has Ngumi sympathies), and partly a war between democracies and dictatorships. Haldeman, in the first part of the novel, excitingly depicts the soldierboy operations, the culture of the mechanics who operate them (including draftee Case), and the “warboys” who follow the mechanics. They seem suspiciously like sf fans in their single-minded devotion, their conventions, and their costumes. They seem a credible phenomenon for a media-covered, high tech, personalized war.
As well as being an addition to the ongoing sf dialogue on war and violence that has been going on at least since Robert A. Heinlein’s Starship Troopers and, of course, includes Haldeman’s The Forever War, this is a contribution to the nanotechnology sub-genre prevalent in the last 10 years. The US and other countries have nanoforges. However, they don’t share the technology with others, especially since the large nanoforges are powered by warm fusion plants. The test of one such fusion plant put a very large crater in North Dakota (though there is some doubt as to whether this was an accident or deliberately staged to make the technology seem dangerous enough to rigorously control). America hands out products from their nanoforge to allies – if they supply the raw materials. Haldeman depicts a depressingly realistic and plausible “Universal Welfare State” (not just in America but throughout the world’s richest countries). Basic necessities are provided by the nanoforges (though it is unclear exactly how much medical care is dispensed). If you want more than your allotment (including the strictly controlled alcohol and other drugs), you have to find a job to pay for such luxuries. Military personnel get unlimited rations of liquor and pay. All are subject to a three year draft. Most of the draft positions are make work jobs supervising computers though Class is physicist in his civilian work and a mechanic in the military. (Mechanics come in the near psychotic hunter killer variety and the more normal, pacific interdiction/disruption variety of which Class is.)
Only a portion of draftees serve in the military. The first half of the book is compelling portrait of future war, its soldiers ("shoes" are regular infantry of the sort we have now), and the politics and society of the future. However, the second half of the novel – after Class becomes suicidal over actually killing someone, albeit accidentally, in the line of the war is less so. Essentially, it’s a thriller plot with two private conspiracies, both with government and military connections, at war with each other.
One is the Hammer of God who are an apocalyptic minded Christian sect who actively seek to bring about the end of the world. They find a convenient tool in the Jupiter Project, a huge, nanoassembled particle accelerator around Jupiter. Case and his physicist lover Amelia, and another cosmologist prove that, when it’s turned on, it will create conditions like those at the very beginning of the Universe and those changes will propagate outward to destroy the universe or, at least, our galaxy – sort of a cosmological reset button. They try to stop the project, and the Hammer of God tries to suppress their warning.
The other conspiracy involves Julian and an appealing group of fellow academics. They call themselves the Saturday Night Special crowd after a theme restaurant celebrating the “California Gang Era”. Its leader (Haldeman spends little time rationalizing the science behind the Jupiter Project’s threat) is Marty Larrin, one of the prime designers of the jack technology. Twenty years ago he discovered that even a group of murderers and Special Forces assassins, immersed in the gestalt of a common jack for 20 days, become “humanized”, that is develop so much empathy for fellow humans they become unable to kill except in reluctant self-defense (and then only when immediately threatened). Larrin and Class hatch a conspiracy to subject all the jacked armed forces to this process than implant jacks in the populace and immerse them in the process. The plot succeeds, and the last of the novel is exciting particularly with the introduction of two very dangerous, very fanatical Hammer of God assassins, Ingram and Gavri. However, their internal psychology seemed implausible and cliched – perhaps Haldeman did this to emphasize their inhumanity since Ingram resists humanization – though Dr. Jackson carefully points out that their viciousness is still not outside the bounds of human experience. I also liked that Class loses his ability to jack and, not humanized, actually comes to want to kill Gavrila and Ingram and, in Gavrila’s case, does. (His lover tries to get jacked but is unsuccessful, and their discussions over why she wants to be jacked and the barrier his ability puts between them are interesting and realistic.
Still, the last few chapters seem rushed, a trifle confusing at times, and the ending seems a bit contrived – particularly with the media moment of a humanized, old POW being whacked by a non-humanized soldier. As a thematic sequel to The Forever War, this book inevitably invites compare and contrast to that novel. Both feature reluctant draftees cynical about their cause and the military. William Mandela of The Forever War learns humanity started the war with the Taurans. Case thinks it possible the Alliance nuked their own Atlanta for propaganda purposes. Both feature alienation of soldiers returning to civilian life. Mandela finds his own world so altered after his first tour of duty that he has to re-enlist. Case, rotating between 10 days as a soldier and twenty days as a civilian has to have a day of transition. Both novels feature welfare states though The Forever War has a welfare state rationing scarce medical care. Forever Peace is a world of plenty. The humanization process of Forever Peace is the technological equivalent of the gestalt mind of the Taurans and the “Man, Kahn-clones” which eventually negotiate an end to the war.
But the most interesting thematic resonance, and it adds an element to the novel that someone not familiar with The Forever War would miss, is the transformation of Class from passive mechanic to willing and necessary killer. The humanized of Forever Peace seem incapable of effectively, fighting unregeneratable psyches like Ingram. Warriors of an unempathetic sort are still needed (though Class still feels his own mortality when looking at Gaurila’s splattered remains), sometimes to kill in cold blood as when Class kills General Blaisdell. Blaisdell poses a real threat, has conspired in real killings, but the humanized, while recognizing his death is necessary, can’t bring themselves to do it. In The Forever War, it was made clear that the Taurans weren’t particularly effective fighters and would have lost the war anyway. Is Haldeman, with his distaste for violence borne of personal combat experience, with his contention that humanity can engineer itself (or, at least, most of its members) a better nature via technology, suggesting the warrior, however reluctant, is still necessary to protect us from our fellow man who are unredeemable? show less
As Haldeman makes clear in his short author’s note, this book is not a plot sequel to his The Forever War, but it is another examination of some of that book’s themes, and I think it draws some of its power through reference to that novel.
By itself, this book opens strongly. All throughout the book is Haldeman’s terse style which features the verbal hooks of irony, understatement, and a delay in revealing crucial information. He chooses a rather odd combination of first person narration by Julian Case and third person omniscient narration. The novel opens with a depiction of soldierboys, military robots operated remotely, in use. They are operated by “mechanics” show more “jacked” into them. The jack is a brain implant that allows full remote transmission and reception (though the traffic either way can be filtered) of sensory input as well as controlling the movements of the soldierboys.
The "jacks" create a subculture amongst their possessors. In the military, a platoon of soldierboys, during their ten day tour of duty, has an intimate, gestalt like connection to one another. Outside the military, people jack into records of other people’s recorded sensory experiences or have sex with fellow jack possessors. There is even a group of ex-mechanics (mostly women – the jacks can not easily be removed) who hang around as prostitutes hoping to jack with mechanics.
The war being fought is between the Ngumi and Alliance coalitions. It’s partly a race war, partly a war between the rich and poor (often a country is an official Alliance member but its poor populace has Ngumi sympathies), and partly a war between democracies and dictatorships. Haldeman, in the first part of the novel, excitingly depicts the soldierboy operations, the culture of the mechanics who operate them (including draftee Case), and the “warboys” who follow the mechanics. They seem suspiciously like sf fans in their single-minded devotion, their conventions, and their costumes. They seem a credible phenomenon for a media-covered, high tech, personalized war.
As well as being an addition to the ongoing sf dialogue on war and violence that has been going on at least since Robert A. Heinlein’s Starship Troopers and, of course, includes Haldeman’s The Forever War, this is a contribution to the nanotechnology sub-genre prevalent in the last 10 years. The US and other countries have nanoforges. However, they don’t share the technology with others, especially since the large nanoforges are powered by warm fusion plants. The test of one such fusion plant put a very large crater in North Dakota (though there is some doubt as to whether this was an accident or deliberately staged to make the technology seem dangerous enough to rigorously control). America hands out products from their nanoforge to allies – if they supply the raw materials. Haldeman depicts a depressingly realistic and plausible “Universal Welfare State” (not just in America but throughout the world’s richest countries). Basic necessities are provided by the nanoforges (though it is unclear exactly how much medical care is dispensed). If you want more than your allotment (including the strictly controlled alcohol and other drugs), you have to find a job to pay for such luxuries. Military personnel get unlimited rations of liquor and pay. All are subject to a three year draft. Most of the draft positions are make work jobs supervising computers though Class is physicist in his civilian work and a mechanic in the military. (Mechanics come in the near psychotic hunter killer variety and the more normal, pacific interdiction/disruption variety of which Class is.)
Only a portion of draftees serve in the military. The first half of the book is compelling portrait of future war, its soldiers ("shoes" are regular infantry of the sort we have now), and the politics and society of the future. However, the second half of the novel – after Class becomes suicidal over actually killing someone, albeit accidentally, in the line of the war is less so. Essentially, it’s a thriller plot with two private conspiracies, both with government and military connections, at war with each other.
One is the Hammer of God who are an apocalyptic minded Christian sect who actively seek to bring about the end of the world. They find a convenient tool in the Jupiter Project, a huge, nanoassembled particle accelerator around Jupiter. Case and his physicist lover Amelia, and another cosmologist prove that, when it’s turned on, it will create conditions like those at the very beginning of the Universe and those changes will propagate outward to destroy the universe or, at least, our galaxy – sort of a cosmological reset button. They try to stop the project, and the Hammer of God tries to suppress their warning.
The other conspiracy involves Julian and an appealing group of fellow academics. They call themselves the Saturday Night Special crowd after a theme restaurant celebrating the “California Gang Era”. Its leader (Haldeman spends little time rationalizing the science behind the Jupiter Project’s threat) is Marty Larrin, one of the prime designers of the jack technology. Twenty years ago he discovered that even a group of murderers and Special Forces assassins, immersed in the gestalt of a common jack for 20 days, become “humanized”, that is develop so much empathy for fellow humans they become unable to kill except in reluctant self-defense (and then only when immediately threatened). Larrin and Class hatch a conspiracy to subject all the jacked armed forces to this process than implant jacks in the populace and immerse them in the process. The plot succeeds, and the last of the novel is exciting particularly with the introduction of two very dangerous, very fanatical Hammer of God assassins, Ingram and Gavri. However, their internal psychology seemed implausible and cliched – perhaps Haldeman did this to emphasize their inhumanity since Ingram resists humanization – though Dr. Jackson carefully points out that their viciousness is still not outside the bounds of human experience. I also liked that Class loses his ability to jack and, not humanized, actually comes to want to kill Gavrila and Ingram and, in Gavrila’s case, does. (His lover tries to get jacked but is unsuccessful, and their discussions over why she wants to be jacked and the barrier his ability puts between them are interesting and realistic.
Still, the last few chapters seem rushed, a trifle confusing at times, and the ending seems a bit contrived – particularly with the media moment of a humanized, old POW being whacked by a non-humanized soldier. As a thematic sequel to The Forever War, this book inevitably invites compare and contrast to that novel. Both feature reluctant draftees cynical about their cause and the military. William Mandela of The Forever War learns humanity started the war with the Taurans. Case thinks it possible the Alliance nuked their own Atlanta for propaganda purposes. Both feature alienation of soldiers returning to civilian life. Mandela finds his own world so altered after his first tour of duty that he has to re-enlist. Case, rotating between 10 days as a soldier and twenty days as a civilian has to have a day of transition. Both novels feature welfare states though The Forever War has a welfare state rationing scarce medical care. Forever Peace is a world of plenty. The humanization process of Forever Peace is the technological equivalent of the gestalt mind of the Taurans and the “Man, Kahn-clones” which eventually negotiate an end to the war.
But the most interesting thematic resonance, and it adds an element to the novel that someone not familiar with The Forever War would miss, is the transformation of Class from passive mechanic to willing and necessary killer. The humanized of Forever Peace seem incapable of effectively, fighting unregeneratable psyches like Ingram. Warriors of an unempathetic sort are still needed (though Class still feels his own mortality when looking at Gaurila’s splattered remains), sometimes to kill in cold blood as when Class kills General Blaisdell. Blaisdell poses a real threat, has conspired in real killings, but the humanized, while recognizing his death is necessary, can’t bring themselves to do it. In The Forever War, it was made clear that the Taurans weren’t particularly effective fighters and would have lost the war anyway. Is Haldeman, with his distaste for violence borne of personal combat experience, with his contention that humanity can engineer itself (or, at least, most of its members) a better nature via technology, suggesting the warrior, however reluctant, is still necessary to protect us from our fellow man who are unredeemable? show less
http://www.nicholaswhyte.info/sf/forpeace.htm
Julian Class and his lover Amelia Harding are physicists at a Texas university in 2049. Julian is also a part-time conscripted soldier, fighting ten days a month in the Central American front of a war between the developed world and the developing world, but doing his fighting by remote control as the brains of a military robot. He and his platoon are linked by a neurological modification known as "jacking" which enables them to share each others' sensations, experiences and memories. He is also the part-time narrator of the book, which drops into third person now and then, giving the impression that his memories have been assembled by a later editor to make a coherent whole. Haldeman used a show more slightly similar presentation in his earlier The Long Habit of Living and I first came across this technique used to devastating effect in the books based on the TV series Yes, Minister! and Yes, Prime Minister! In this case, of course, it helps the author get around the problem of a first-person narrator who has suicidal impulses; by dropping into the third person now and again we readers are kept guessing as to whether or not the narrator makes it to the end of the book (cf. Podkayne of Mars, Flowers for Algernon.)
When Haldeman writes in the foreword to Forever Peace that it examines some of the problems of his earlier novel, The Forever War, "from an aspect that didn't exist twenty years ago", one of the problems in question must surely be the evolution of humanity towards the day "when violence towards another human being must become as abhorrent as eating another's flesh", to use the words of Martin Luther King quoted in the first pages of the book. The aspect that (I guess) didn't exist in 1974 is the concept of nanotechnology and by extension the whole set of ideas about the human/computer interface associated with the cyberpunk movement, which came to the fore in sf only in the 1990s. It transpires that those who have been "jacked" with other people for more than two weeks become "humanised", incapable of deadly violence against other human beings. Julian and Amelia (who for various reasons are both excluded from being affected in this way themselves) decide that this is a Good Thing and conspire with their friends to get the entire command structure of the US military modified in this way.
There is a second conspiracy, one which they are working against. It turns out that the vastly ambitious particle physics experiment Amelia has been working on has the potential to end the universe (or at least the solar system) by replicating the conditions of the Big Bang. A millennialist conspiracy within the higher reaches of the US government decides that the end of the world would be a Good Thing and resolves to thwart Amelia's efforts to prevent the experiment from being carried out. Various agents are sent to stop them, including a memorably sexy female assassin. But the good guys triumph just in time. Some find the idea of such conspiracies at high level in the US government unconvincing. Well, first of all, it's a novel, and novels contain things which are not true but make a good story. Secondly, I've been sufficiently involved in shedding light on various Balkan conspiracies involving the highest levels of government that little can surprise me any more.
The future war in Central America is between a developed world fighting largely by remote control, and an indigenous population absorbing most of the casualties; from the 1997 perspective, this must have seemed a reasonable extrapolation from the 1990-91 Gulf War, and indeed Kosovo in 1999 and Afghanistan in 2001 were largely fought on that basis. Haldeman even has a massive, one-off attack on a major American city, though it's nuking Atlanta rather than jumbo jets in New York. The descriptions of the conflict are graphic, on a par with Lucius Shepard's Life In Wartime, and the narrative is particularly gripping as the assassin closes in on our heroes towards the end. As a novel, it works. The portrayal of Julian's suicidal impulses and emotional confusion is convincing, and we the readers can see what is really going on for Amelia through his perceptions. The fact that neither main characters is able to share in the jacked consciousness of the newly enhanced humanity is rather poignant. The final couple of pages, describing the victory of the good guys, are perhaps a little too rapid, and when we first encounter those who have already been "humanised" in their North Dakota hideout, I found the scene rather reminiscent of the decaying scientists in the 1983 Doctor Who story Mawdryn Undead, which slightly spoiled it for me. But in general, I felt the tone was more mature and the ending more plausible, if the style a little less raw, than Haldeman's earlier Hugo and Nebula winner, The Forever War.
One of the least successful aspects of Haldeman's earlier book is its portrayal of a pacifist end-state for the human race. The Big Idea of Forever Peace is that this pacifist end-state can be achieved by technological intervention; through the sharing of our common humanity via "jacking". Now, the idea that the Next Big Step in human evolution will involve a fundamental shift in consciousness is quite an old one, with honorable antecedents in Olaf Stapledon and George Bernard Shaw up to Arthur C Clarke's Childhood's End and Greg Bear's Blood Music. The angle is still an unusual one. I was reminded a bit of Frank Herbert's minor novel, The Santaroga Barrier, where the hero begins by rejecting the prospect of a new form of human consciousness but end up eagerly participating. Forever Peace's biggest flaw, as a novel examining issues of humanity and morality, is that it lacks an examination of the ethics of forcing major (and risky) brain surgery on people to bestow on them the benefits of the evolutionary leap forward.
https://fromtheheartofeurope.eu/forever-peace-by-joe-haldeman/
Coming back to it twenty-two years later, I feel that it has not aged especially well. The waging of war remotely, and the attached civilian horrors, perhaps resonate with today’s atrocities in Ukraine and Gaza, though of course these are being largely waged by drone and missile, with deployment of human troops a smaller part of the story than was the case fifty years ago (though still very important). We can see now that Haldeman’s anthropomorphic soldier robots are militarily unnecessary.
And who would have thought that rather than conspiracy theorists in government needing to hide their activities from the authorities, they would actually be getting cabinet-level appointments from the incoming president of the United States?
And the woman assassin at the end is just a little bit too homicidally competent to be true. show less
Julian Class and his lover Amelia Harding are physicists at a Texas university in 2049. Julian is also a part-time conscripted soldier, fighting ten days a month in the Central American front of a war between the developed world and the developing world, but doing his fighting by remote control as the brains of a military robot. He and his platoon are linked by a neurological modification known as "jacking" which enables them to share each others' sensations, experiences and memories. He is also the part-time narrator of the book, which drops into third person now and then, giving the impression that his memories have been assembled by a later editor to make a coherent whole. Haldeman used a show more slightly similar presentation in his earlier The Long Habit of Living and I first came across this technique used to devastating effect in the books based on the TV series Yes, Minister! and Yes, Prime Minister! In this case, of course, it helps the author get around the problem of a first-person narrator who has suicidal impulses; by dropping into the third person now and again we readers are kept guessing as to whether or not the narrator makes it to the end of the book (cf. Podkayne of Mars, Flowers for Algernon.)
When Haldeman writes in the foreword to Forever Peace that it examines some of the problems of his earlier novel, The Forever War, "from an aspect that didn't exist twenty years ago", one of the problems in question must surely be the evolution of humanity towards the day "when violence towards another human being must become as abhorrent as eating another's flesh", to use the words of Martin Luther King quoted in the first pages of the book. The aspect that (I guess) didn't exist in 1974 is the concept of nanotechnology and by extension the whole set of ideas about the human/computer interface associated with the cyberpunk movement, which came to the fore in sf only in the 1990s. It transpires that those who have been "jacked" with other people for more than two weeks become "humanised", incapable of deadly violence against other human beings. Julian and Amelia (who for various reasons are both excluded from being affected in this way themselves) decide that this is a Good Thing and conspire with their friends to get the entire command structure of the US military modified in this way.
There is a second conspiracy, one which they are working against. It turns out that the vastly ambitious particle physics experiment Amelia has been working on has the potential to end the universe (or at least the solar system) by replicating the conditions of the Big Bang. A millennialist conspiracy within the higher reaches of the US government decides that the end of the world would be a Good Thing and resolves to thwart Amelia's efforts to prevent the experiment from being carried out. Various agents are sent to stop them, including a memorably sexy female assassin. But the good guys triumph just in time. Some find the idea of such conspiracies at high level in the US government unconvincing. Well, first of all, it's a novel, and novels contain things which are not true but make a good story. Secondly, I've been sufficiently involved in shedding light on various Balkan conspiracies involving the highest levels of government that little can surprise me any more.
The future war in Central America is between a developed world fighting largely by remote control, and an indigenous population absorbing most of the casualties; from the 1997 perspective, this must have seemed a reasonable extrapolation from the 1990-91 Gulf War, and indeed Kosovo in 1999 and Afghanistan in 2001 were largely fought on that basis. Haldeman even has a massive, one-off attack on a major American city, though it's nuking Atlanta rather than jumbo jets in New York. The descriptions of the conflict are graphic, on a par with Lucius Shepard's Life In Wartime, and the narrative is particularly gripping as the assassin closes in on our heroes towards the end. As a novel, it works. The portrayal of Julian's suicidal impulses and emotional confusion is convincing, and we the readers can see what is really going on for Amelia through his perceptions. The fact that neither main characters is able to share in the jacked consciousness of the newly enhanced humanity is rather poignant. The final couple of pages, describing the victory of the good guys, are perhaps a little too rapid, and when we first encounter those who have already been "humanised" in their North Dakota hideout, I found the scene rather reminiscent of the decaying scientists in the 1983 Doctor Who story Mawdryn Undead, which slightly spoiled it for me. But in general, I felt the tone was more mature and the ending more plausible, if the style a little less raw, than Haldeman's earlier Hugo and Nebula winner, The Forever War.
One of the least successful aspects of Haldeman's earlier book is its portrayal of a pacifist end-state for the human race. The Big Idea of Forever Peace is that this pacifist end-state can be achieved by technological intervention; through the sharing of our common humanity via "jacking". Now, the idea that the Next Big Step in human evolution will involve a fundamental shift in consciousness is quite an old one, with honorable antecedents in Olaf Stapledon and George Bernard Shaw up to Arthur C Clarke's Childhood's End and Greg Bear's Blood Music. The angle is still an unusual one. I was reminded a bit of Frank Herbert's minor novel, The Santaroga Barrier, where the hero begins by rejecting the prospect of a new form of human consciousness but end up eagerly participating. Forever Peace's biggest flaw, as a novel examining issues of humanity and morality, is that it lacks an examination of the ethics of forcing major (and risky) brain surgery on people to bestow on them the benefits of the evolutionary leap forward.
https://fromtheheartofeurope.eu/forever-peace-by-joe-haldeman/
Coming back to it twenty-two years later, I feel that it has not aged especially well. The waging of war remotely, and the attached civilian horrors, perhaps resonate with today’s atrocities in Ukraine and Gaza, though of course these are being largely waged by drone and missile, with deployment of human troops a smaller part of the story than was the case fifty years ago (though still very important). We can see now that Haldeman’s anthropomorphic soldier robots are militarily unnecessary.
And who would have thought that rather than conspiracy theorists in government needing to hide their activities from the authorities, they would actually be getting cabinet-level appointments from the incoming president of the United States?
And the woman assassin at the end is just a little bit too homicidally competent to be true. show less
Această carte are o grămadă de probleme și o singură calitate, faptul că se citește cu ușurință, scriitura fiind una naturală, fără fasoane (ceea ce eu apreciez). Nu are nici o legătură cu ”Războiul Etern” nici ca poveste/lume, nici la calitate sau la impact, alegerea titlului fiind evident motivată doar de scopul ”cash grab”. Probleme:
- nu e o carte, ci practic 2: la jumătate Halderman se plictisește și deraiază pe cu totul altă poveste;
- nu e un military scifi decât vag, la început, și acela prost realizat;
- e lungită, plicitisitoare și dezlânată;
- e lipsită de originalitate, fiind o compilație de șabloane și idei destul de cunoscute (roboți de luptă conduși de la distanță, războaie show more asimetrice Nord-Sud, experiment științific ce poate distruge lumea etc);
- trecerea constantă de la pers I la III cu referire la același personaj este obositoare și absolut inutilă, nu i-am înțeles scopul;
- lumea e subdezvoltată ca descriere, nu e prea clar de ce se întâmplă ce se întâmplă, ”noroc” de faptul că oricum nu m-a păsat;
- personajele nu sunt bine construite și majoritatea celor secundare apar și dispar fără noimă și fără a fi dezvoltate;
- ca și în Războiul Etern, Halderman are o problemă cu excesul obsesiv de referințe la sex; cartea curge cam așa: ceva, ceva, SEX!, ceva, SEX, SEX!, ceva, ceva, SEX! etc; obositor și inutil;
- efectiv nu mi-a păsat de soarta nici unui personaj, nu am avut nici o emoție când s-au aflat în pericol.
Și altele. Pare scrisă în scârbă și fără chef, doar pentru vreun deadline, iar aici Halderman nu mai are nimic de transmis sufletește, spre deosebire de Războiul Etern.
Per total, un eșec; recomand evitarea. Are două stele doar fiindcă există destule SF-uri și mai proaste... show less
- nu e o carte, ci practic 2: la jumătate Halderman se plictisește și deraiază pe cu totul altă poveste;
- nu e un military scifi decât vag, la început, și acela prost realizat;
- e lungită, plicitisitoare și dezlânată;
- e lipsită de originalitate, fiind o compilație de șabloane și idei destul de cunoscute (roboți de luptă conduși de la distanță, războaie show more asimetrice Nord-Sud, experiment științific ce poate distruge lumea etc);
- trecerea constantă de la pers I la III cu referire la același personaj este obositoare și absolut inutilă, nu i-am înțeles scopul;
- lumea e subdezvoltată ca descriere, nu e prea clar de ce se întâmplă ce se întâmplă, ”noroc” de faptul că oricum nu m-a păsat;
- personajele nu sunt bine construite și majoritatea celor secundare apar și dispar fără noimă și fără a fi dezvoltate;
- ca și în Războiul Etern, Halderman are o problemă cu excesul obsesiv de referințe la sex; cartea curge cam așa: ceva, ceva, SEX!, ceva, SEX, SEX!, ceva, ceva, SEX! etc; obositor și inutil;
- efectiv nu mi-a păsat de soarta nici unui personaj, nu am avut nici o emoție când s-au aflat în pericol.
Și altele. Pare scrisă în scârbă și fără chef, doar pentru vreun deadline, iar aici Halderman nu mai are nimic de transmis sufletește, spre deosebire de Războiul Etern.
Per total, un eșec; recomand evitarea. Are două stele doar fiindcă există destule SF-uri și mai proaste... show less
In this book Haldeman explores the shared consciousness that we saw at the end of Forever War and in Forever Free, but while this book is set in a very similar universe, it is a different one.
But just like in Forever Free, Haldeman can't finish the book properly after building a very interesting world and scenario. The protagonists become irrelevant and we watch as deus ex machina unfolds. Except here the protagonists made the deus ex machina possible, it's just that the book forgets about it. Why kill Blaisdell? He could be humanized in two days and become a most valuable asset to them, or at least have someone jack with him for information, but I guess it's supposed to be emotionally satisfying, but there is this incredible tension show more and enemy builing up throughout the book, and it is solved in one sentence ("they figued it out"), while the protagonists are just standing somewhere not too far.
I also feel like humanizing was a bit too much simplified here. I mean "Could you step out while I shoot this guy? I guess yeah." Come on!
Looking back now, Forever War was kind of solved by deus ex machina too, but because the whole book is about the protagonist being thrown through events by bigger forces it felt natural there. But when you have 200 pages of protagonists plotting something big, but they just don't matter in the last 50 pages, but the book is still following them... it's different I guess.
This is still a better book than Forever Free, because there you get nothing but a promise of something interesting happening later and then nothing happening. Here the build-up itself explores many interesting ideas and it's definetly worth reading. It's only that the ending is a bit dissapointing. show less
But just like in Forever Free, Haldeman can't finish the book properly after building a very interesting world and scenario. The protagonists become irrelevant and we watch as deus ex machina unfolds. Except here the protagonists made the deus ex machina possible, it's just that the book forgets about it. Why kill Blaisdell? He could be humanized in two days and become a most valuable asset to them, or at least have someone jack with him for information, but I guess it's supposed to be emotionally satisfying, but there is this incredible tension show more and enemy builing up throughout the book, and it is solved in one sentence ("they figued it out"), while the protagonists are just standing somewhere not too far.
I also feel like humanizing was a bit too much simplified here. I mean "Could you step out while I shoot this guy? I guess yeah." Come on!
Looking back now, Forever War was kind of solved by deus ex machina too, but because the whole book is about the protagonist being thrown through events by bigger forces it felt natural there. But when you have 200 pages of protagonists plotting something big, but they just don't matter in the last 50 pages, but the book is still following them... it's different I guess.
This is still a better book than Forever Free, because there you get nothing but a promise of something interesting happening later and then nothing happening. Here the build-up itself explores many interesting ideas and it's definetly worth reading. It's only that the ending is a bit dissapointing. show less
Well, if you read The Forever War, you might as well go ahead and read Forever Peace, right? (Actually, I read them in the opposite order.) Forever Peace is a thematic sequel to The Forever War. Unlike a straightforward sequel, it doesn't continue the events of the previous book or follow the same characters. Instead, it takes place on Earth in the near future and presents an alternate view of never-ending war and our response to it.
In the future world of Forever Peace, the United States possesses nanoforge technology, which can create pretty much anything out of raw materials. The U.S. is also in a perpetual war with most of the countries in the Southern hemisphere, which don’t have the nanoforge. U.S. military fights the war show more virtually via robots called “soldierboys,” which are controlled by soldiers who are “jacked in” to the killing machines hundreds of miles away.
Julian is one of those soldiers, but when a mission goes horribly wrong, he can no longer bring himself to fight. When his lover, Amelia, discovers that a planned physics experiment will destroy the universe, creating a doomsday device that anyone with a nanoforge and enough raw materials can build, Julian realizes that mankind can no longer afford our warlike nature. Then another scientist friend reveals a solution, one that may either enhance our humanity or remove it altogether.
This was a very entertaining book, with a lot of interesting ideas. I particularly like the way the experience of jacking, not such a new concept in science fiction, is explored. However, after a very long build-up and way too much exposition, I found the end to be unsatisfactorily abrupt and too cut-and-dried. It does seem like eliminating our warlike tendencies is the right course of action to take, but how ethical is it to do so against peoples’ will? No character really takes a stand on this or offers an alternative viewpoint for the rather sticky ethical question raised. The only opposition are such grotesque nutjobs who will do literally anything to bring about the apocalypse so that of course the protagonists seem very sane by comparison.
So even though I really enjoyed Forever Peace, I ended up wishing for a bit more depth to it. show less
In the future world of Forever Peace, the United States possesses nanoforge technology, which can create pretty much anything out of raw materials. The U.S. is also in a perpetual war with most of the countries in the Southern hemisphere, which don’t have the nanoforge. U.S. military fights the war show more virtually via robots called “soldierboys,” which are controlled by soldiers who are “jacked in” to the killing machines hundreds of miles away.
Julian is one of those soldiers, but when a mission goes horribly wrong, he can no longer bring himself to fight. When his lover, Amelia, discovers that a planned physics experiment will destroy the universe, creating a doomsday device that anyone with a nanoforge and enough raw materials can build, Julian realizes that mankind can no longer afford our warlike nature. Then another scientist friend reveals a solution, one that may either enhance our humanity or remove it altogether.
This was a very entertaining book, with a lot of interesting ideas. I particularly like the way the experience of jacking, not such a new concept in science fiction, is explored. However, after a very long build-up and way too much exposition, I found the end to be unsatisfactorily abrupt and too cut-and-dried. It does seem like eliminating our warlike tendencies is the right course of action to take, but how ethical is it to do so against peoples’ will? No character really takes a stand on this or offers an alternative viewpoint for the rather sticky ethical question raised. The only opposition are such grotesque nutjobs who will do literally anything to bring about the apocalypse so that of course the protagonists seem very sane by comparison.
So even though I really enjoyed Forever Peace, I ended up wishing for a bit more depth to it. show less
This was definitely a thought-provoking read on human nature and war.
The society present in this world is fairly violent, and from what we see outside of the the academic compounds, is getting worse. We see the fairly sheltered, quite relaxed world of academia in stark contrast with "regular" society where people often have to turn to prostitution to get by.
We also see that in this world, people are often forced to join the military and undergo a dangerous procedure to get a jack put into their heads. The thought that this sort of thing was a possibility is terrifying.
Overall, this story was very interesting and a little scary with all the implications. I can't say that I entirely agree with the methods that the scientists used to show more achieve the ending. show less
The society present in this world is fairly violent, and from what we see outside of the the academic compounds, is getting worse. We see the fairly sheltered, quite relaxed world of academia in stark contrast with "regular" society where people often have to turn to prostitution to get by.
We also see that in this world, people are often forced to join the military and undergo a dangerous procedure to get a jack put into their heads. The thought that this sort of thing was a possibility is terrifying.
Overall, this story was very interesting and a little scary with all the implications. I can't say that I entirely agree with the methods that the scientists used to show more achieve the ending. show less
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Author Information
191+ Works 30,813 Members
Joe Haldeman has uniquely blended a strong interest in astronomy and with his love for writing to publish numerous novels, anthologies and short stories over three decades. He holds a B.S. in astronomy from the University of Maryland (1967), and an M.F.A. in English from the Iowa Writers Workshop (1975). An adjunct professor at Massachusetts show more Institute of Technology, Haldeman has also taught at Michigan State, Larion West Seattle, SUNY Buffalo, Princeton, University of North Dakota, Kent State and the University of North Florida Haldeman's works include War Year (1972), The Forever War (1975), Worlds (1981), Worlds Apart (1983), Tools of the Trade (1987), and The Hemingway Hoax (1990). He has also co-authored and edited numerous works of science fiction. Born in Oklahoma on June 9, 1943, Haldeman grew up in Puerto Rico, New Orleans, Washington D.C., and Alaska. He was drafted into the military in 1967, fighting in the Central Highlands of Vietnam as a combat engineer with the 4th Division (1/22nd Airmobile Battalion), for which he received the Purple Heart, among other medals. (Bowker Author Biography) show less
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Common Knowledge
- Canonical title*
- Der ewige Friede
- Original title
- Forever Peace
- Original publication date
- 1997
- People/Characters
- Julian Class
- Important places
- USA
- Epigraph
- "Man was born into barbarism, when killing his fellow man was a normal condition of existence. He became endowed with a conscience. And he has now reached the day when violence toward another human being must become as abhorr... (show all)ent as eating another's flesh."
—Martin Luther King, Jr. - Dedication
- This novel is for two editors: John W. Campbell, who rejected a story because he thought it was absurd to write about American women who fight and die in combat, and Ben Bova, who didn't.
- First words
- It was not quite completely dark, thin blue moonlight threading down through the canopy of leaves.
- Last words
- (Click to show. Warning: May contain spoilers.)Alone, together. The way it always used to be.
- Blurbers
- King, Stephen; Straub, Peter
- Canonical DDC/MDS
- 813.087623
*Some information comes from Common Knowledge in other languages. Click "Edit" for more information.
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- Science Fiction, Fiction and Literature
- DDC/MDS
- 813.087623 — Literature & rhetoric American literature in English American fiction in English By type Genre fiction Adventure fiction Speculative fiction Science fiction Military science fiction
- LCC
- PS3558 .A353 .F6 — Language and Literature American literature American literature Individual authors 1961-
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