The Forever War

A soldier fighting in the interstellar war between humans and an alien species must deal with the time dilation effects of space travel as well as the unending warfare.

I have to wonder why it's Starship Troopers and not this book that is the must-read military science fiction novel. The Forever War is much better written and more entertaining, and I appreciated its anti-war message more than Heinlein's jingoism.

I also enjoyed that the novel made relativity an important part of the plot, so that the book spans an incredibly long period of time, incorporating many technological changes and cultural revolutions, while still keeping the same main character. Many novels with light-speed travel seem to forget about relativity. At first, I show more was put off that the beginning of the book takes place so close to the present day -- it didn't seem realistic -- but once I realized how much time the story was going to cover, I forgave that discrepancy.

All in all, this is an entertaining read that deserves to be a science fiction classic. show less

I read this because Wikipedia said it's a response to Starship Troopers. And what a response it is! The best use of relativity theory in sci-fi I read so far. This book has so much more thought and feeling in it than Starship Troopers. Heinlein should have wrote a 10 page novella, he had so little to say. But this book takes its premise and does go places with it, and has places to go. Both society and war are far more interesting here. I thought I'd be bored by battle scenes but in the best possible sci-fi fashion they are new and interesting each the time.
I would give it five stars except I know this isn't of those books I will re-read 10 times. This book doesn't have conversations and details like my favorite books and won't change show more the way I look at things. But it's a great experience to read once, maybe twice when I forget most of it. And I can't wait to read the sequels :) show less

Some novels are deceptively small: short enough in page count that you can't imagine there will be much of a journey between the covers, only to be walloped by a torrent of events. Such a novel is The Forever War, fast-paced in the sense of "future shock". Alvin Toffler even gets a mention at one point. The potentially lethal combination of military jargon and technobabble happily never goes beyond the pale. The heart of this novel is its direct acknowledgement of time dilation, a phenomenon conveniently ignored by sci-fi derisively called 'space opera'. It holds out the hope that Mandella can eventually escape from a cold society that lacks for compassion and humanism whether he's serving with the army or dabbling in civilian life. show more It's never exactly a dystopia, but not a future to look forward to. It's little wonder that he struggles to find meaning in what he's fighting for.

There's an odd, two-way emotional distance between Mandella and his parents that's never explained, and a brother is suddenly mentioned out of the blue. Maybe this family is just that way - there's no emotion attached whatsoever to the news that his father died - but it comes across as weak characterization, particularly when his 84-yr-old mother is talking like a sociology professor. Mandella at least is well-drawn, particularly in the way his detachment ramps up with his experience: horrified at the rigours of war and peace, then horrified that he's no longer horrified. I'm disappointed with the ending. I feel something entirely different was called for, and I was very surprised not to get it. Dwelling on the ending that's provided would make this novel shallower. Like the time dilation its characters experience, I remind myself it's primarily the journey to get there that counts. show less

A very odd duck in the military sci fi genre. Despite the title the war takes a passenger seat to a story that's more about humanity changing over thousands of years, and the protagonist experiencing that through time dilation effects as he goes in and out of battles. The war episodes are strangely "realistic", in as much as they're not heroic, the preparation and waiting is longer than any action and one episode basically starts with an immediate failure. People die in droves to enemies that remain largely unseen. The author is channeling a lot of his Vietnam War experience into this future war and it shows, especially in the ultimate conclusion.
The other, larger part of the story has some strong wafts of the 60s and 70s era; with show more episodes of "free love" giving way to paranoia about overpopulation (at a then staggering 9 billion) and resource wars, which in turn gives way for new (government mandated) formulations of sexuality and relationships. Sometimes weirdly prescient about technologies like a universal digital payment system no bigger than a wallet. Sometimes drastically overestimating problems soon to come. The predictions about future social changes don't have time to stick around and be over-analyzed because the protagonist has soon jumped decades or a century ahead, to a whole new world; giving him some of that Future Shock the author references.
There's some parallels (apparently intentional) to Starship Troopers here, as well as some ideas cribbed from Dune. It all works to the book's benefit. show less

4.5/5

While pretty simple in plot and prose style The Forever War is without a doubt the best military SF novel I've read to date. Told through the eyes of conscripted private William Mandala, who is sent through a wormhole across the universe to fight an enemy he knows nothing about, and leaves behind everyone he has ever known thanks to the time dilation effect of getting to the front lines.

It's a very straight forward allegory for the Vietnam war, and all of the horrors that soldiers experience during training, battle, and returning to civilian life. It's the detail, subtlety, and care that goes into this exploration that sets it apart from a lot of it's contemporaries in the Military SF sub-genre. The main characters themselves are show more named after Joe William Haldeman and his wife, Mary Gay. It felt extremely personal to dive so deeply into his experience during the war, and upon his return to the US. The Forever War make it clear just how alienating and isolating it is to sacrifice so much, watch your only friends die during routine training, confront an enemy that you're not even sure is an enemy in the first place, and return to your home shattered by the experience only to find that your culture and society have changed so much that you feel compelled to return to the front line.

The science fiction elements of the story were so interesting and well thought-out. I love the deep exploration of the ramifications of time dilation, creating a dynamic and inconsistent battlefield while also complicating supply lines and military logistics, let alone the psychological consequences. The ending of the novel is super dense with science fiction ideas that made sense within the context of the world, and made for interesting lingering ideas to mull over upon finishing.

I mean, what can I say. There's a reason why this is such a classic in the SF genre. I'm glad to have found that the hype surrounding it did not oversell it. The only thing that I can really fault it for is that simplicity that I mentioned earlier. Had Haldemen been a better craftsman of prose at the time, this could've easily been a 5/5, not that it's far off at it is. Plus that simplicity makes it super approachable for young/newer readers, even if the themes are complex and dark. It's just nice to see some military SF that paints a realistic picture of war. It's amazing that the pulp adventure style to the action, which is sufficiently fun to read, combines so well with his exploration of the themes. show less

You can say pretty much everything worth saying about powered armor space marines between The Forever War and Starship Troopers. Joe Haldeman's The Forever War covers the same ground of training, combat, recuperation, and command as Heinlein's novel, but from a pacifistic and detached post-Vietnam perspective. William Mandella, our hero, is a reluctant soldier, an "elite draftee" with an IQ over 150 and a physics background sent out to fight an unknown alien enemy, the Taurans, who have been hitting human colony ships. FTL involves jumps through collapsars, black holes with orbiting planetoids, so Mandella and his comrades are trained to fight in extreme conditions just above absolute zero, with seas of liquid helium and deadly hydrogen show more ice sheets. The plan is simple: land on a planetoid, kill any Taurens, construct a bunker and laser installation and hold till relieved.

Of course, the first rule of all military activity is SNAFU, and for their first mission, Mandella is sent to a jungle world at near boiling temperatures. Their landing site is mile underwater (fortunately their dropships are submersible), the local wildlife is telepathic, and after an unprovoked attack kills the platoon's telepathic sensitive and spookily shadows them. The Tauren's don't fight back, but one escapes in a personal spaceship. Despite the lack of resistance, some of the squad is killed by anti-air weapon. Mandella is disgusted by the use of post-hypnotic suggestion to make him fight. A second encounter in space goes poorly for their cruiser and they retreat, with one of my favorite lines in the book "...surely the Captain was not possessed by something so unmilitary as the will to live." This is where one of the central conceits of the book is introduced. Though FTL exists, relativistic maneuvering around collapsars and fighting in the warped spacetime on portal planets dilates time for soldiers. Soldiers, even if they survive, can never really go back to a planet that has experienced decades of time to their subjective year-long tour. Worse, enemy forces can come from your subjective future, with the benefits of extra R&D. Technically, this advantage applies to both sides at random, but that's cold comfort when the enemy shows up with a superweapon you've never seen and have no counter for.

The second chunk of the book was stripped from the original version (I'm reading the 1991 complete edition), and follows Mandella on an Earth that has gone downhill since he left. His mother is 80 years old, a food war killed billions, and the survivors are equally victimized by a powerful one-world government which controls food, power, and jobs, and criminal factions which provide necessary work-arounds to the system and random criminal violence. Mandella and his lover, lost on Earth, re-enlist on promise of a safe training job and are immediately reassigned to combat. Mandella is no hero, but a knack for survival gets him promoted to Major and strike force command. By now, he's separated by centuries from the troops, who are creche raised and all gay, with heterosexuality treated as a curable deviance. Command is no picnic, Mandella is profoundly alone and untrusted by his troops, and separated forever from his lover. He sets up a base on a larger than average portal planet in the Magellanic Cloud, survives one last battle, which features a lone fighter making an attack run at .999c that destroys the enemy cruiser and shatters Mandella's bunker with an earthquake, and returns home to find that the war is over. Humanity has been replaced by Man, a race of clones, which has reached a peace settlement with the Taurans, also a race of clones. The whole war was a lie, the initial attack faked by UN high command who thought a war was just what Earth needed to kick it out of an economic depression. Baseline humans have settled space, and Mandella's lover Marygay, has also survived, using an obsolete cruiser as a relativistic shuttle until he returns.

Some closing thoughts: Haldeman is obviously a talent. He wrote this book in his late 20s (serialized in 1972, novel in 1974) as an MFA thesis at the Iowa Writer's Workshop, which is the major influence on post-war American literary fiction. It's a personal novel as well; Haldeman is a Vietnam veteran with a physics degree, his wife shares a name with Mandella's partner. While Starship Troopers takes war as necessary to glorious, The Forever War sees it as dehumanizing and full of lies. The basic incompetence of commanders, and the numerous ways in which they screw with ordinary soldiers, is a repeated theme. The mutual alienation of soldiers, the society they are "defending", and the reasons for the war, are all directly translated from the Vietnam War. The social side is also fascinating. Mandella's army is a grunt's fantasy, 50-50 coed with willing combat females, legal marijuana after hours, and "Fuck you, sir!" as the mandatory closing refrain. Many changes on Earth are only sketched at, but the shift to mandatory homosexuality as a birth control measure is handled pretty well for a novel written back when being gay was still technically a mental illness ("...you think you're tolerant, sir.") But one of the coolest scifi points, and one which is easy to overlook, is the way The Forever War plays with temporality. While the Vietnam War as a whole seemed to go on forever, individual soldiers were acutely aware of how much time they had left on their 365 day tour, unlike the space marines who are unlikely to ever see the end of their two-year subjective enlistment. The subjectivity of time is another interesting point. In Vietnam, everybody's tours counted down the same, whether you were safe running a PX in Da Nang or an airmobile machinegunner who might see 300 days of combat. Time's the thing. show less

It's fascinating how so many veterans turned to writing Science Fiction after returning home from their wartime experiences - their writing acting as a not only a form of therapy, but also as a means to explore the impact of the war on themselves, on others, and how the return to civilian life often made them feel like a stranger in their own country. David Drake (Vietnam) and Jerry Pournelle (Korea) immediately come to mind, but perhaps I'm most reminded of the work of Walter M. Miller Jr. (World War II) - and for Haldeman (Vietnam) there are points in the novel which feel very "real", the catharsis he must have felt in putting pen to paper is palpable, and the story is all the better for it.

Even if one were to ignore how intertwined show more the work is with Haldeman's own experiences (the protagonist's name, Mandella, is a reworking of the author's own), it also stands on its own solely as a work of Science Fiction. The exploration of time dilation of those conducting the war and the ensuing societal change on those left behind are powerfully explored, and somehow Haldeman even manages to nail an ending which feels both fitting and satisfying, if a bit rushed given all that occurred before. show less