The Forever War

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

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

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

The most enticing selling point for The Forever War, Joe Haldeman's classic sci-fi novel from 1974, isn't its reputation as a classic sci-fi novel. It's that Haldeman, a Vietnam War veteran, had written the story as an allegory for the disconnected feeling American soldiers felt upon returning from that theatre. Engaged in a long war with a race of aliens known as Taurans – which, because of the relativity of time in travelling across space, becomes a 'forever war' – the protagonist, William Mandella, returns home disaffected, combat-weary and completely alienated from the society that has developed while he was away.

With such a great concept, it is disappointing that The Forever War contains many of the flaws of classic sci-fi, and show more does not reach the literary heights of a compelling anti-war novel. Like a lot of classic sci-fi, Haldeman's book contains some unrefined storytelling and cardboard characters, redeemed only by its fine ideas. Its aliens – the Taurans – remain completely undeveloped (and consequently non-threatening), and there's a hefty dose of made-up sci-fi jargon. And, again like a lot of classic sci-fi, Haldeman hasn't yet broken clear of the genre's pulp-magazine origins; in particular, the seedy and teenage-boy-like attitude to sex, with the female soldiers in the story sexually "compliant and promiscuous by military custom (and law)" (pg. 45), is cringeworthy. I don't clutch pearls about this sort of thing (nor with the peculiar ideas about homosexuality later in the story), but when they're this overt it's hard to ignore them, and the reader can only reflect on how parts of the story have aged poorly.

Despite these flaws, The Forever War survives as a sci-fi story pretty much intact; it's readable and expands upon its central concepts of relativity and disconnect enough to make the book more than a pot-boiler. Certainly, the shallowness of the characterisation and the plot developments pale when you see how easily the story zips along. But the book struggles to really sink these ideas – and the anti-war sentiment behind them – deep enough to earn a literary reputation. Certainly, those who describe The Forever War as a sci-fi counterpart to All Quiet on the Western Front are grossly exaggerating the book's weight (or are grossly underselling Remarque's seminal novel). I suspect many of those who make the comparison haven't even read Remarque's novel, in order to validate the observation; in my experience, those who champion classic sci-fi tend to read nothing other than classic sci-fi.

Suffice to say, the comparison shines cold and unwelcome light on The Forever War. There's nothing of the depth and intricacy of All Quiet on the Western Front in Haldeman's entertaining but workmanlike adventure, and certainly no scene that compares in emotional, thematic or literary impact to Remarque's famous scene in the shell crater, or the screams of the horses under shellfire. Pausing just for a moment or two in Haldeman's hasty unpacking of his story might well have delivered a comparable scene, because the underlying ideas are good.

Now, it is perhaps unfair to condemn a book by so readily balancing it in the scales with a much superior book. But The Forever War has such a great idea in its makeup that if it's ultimately found wanting, it can only be through its own failure to deliver it. The Forever War is an entertaining story that touches on deeper themes of relativity, disconnect and war, but by the end remains too pulpy in its tone and hasty in its execution to really sound the depths of them. show less

Haldeman, Joe. The Forever War. 1974. Introduction by Adam Roberts. Foreword by John Scalzi. Author’s Note by Haldeman. Forever War No. 1. Orion, 2011.
In 1974, Joe Haldeman’s The Forever War was probably the best military science fiction since E. E. Doc Smith. As Haldeman points out in his 1997 Foreword, it said things about war that a generation fresh from the war in Vietnam were not eager to hear. As John Scalzi said more than a decade later, it was time for the generation that missed Vietnam to hear it again, and as clueless Russian soldiers kill and die in Ukraine, it is time to hear it again. Most war stories tell us how soldiers are changed by war. The Forever War tells us instead how war changes the society veterans must show more reenter. It is that story that publishers of early editions felt they had to cut. After a thousand years of time-dilated war, William Mandella returns to a society in which people are no longer quite human. His only option is to drop out and move to a planet appropriately named Middle Finger. 5 Stars show less

I decided I'd passed this novel over long enough, given that it keeps showing up on best-of lists. It charts the life of Mandella from grunt to Major within a centuries-long off-planet war with the alien Taurans. Due to the effects of time dilation when traveling at light speed, Mandella is soon the oldest veteran in the military. A more skilled writer might have turned this in to a character study of Mandella as he grows increasingly disconnected from a human culture that is drastically different every time he returns from light speed travel. Haldeman seems to know his limitations, however, and he writes a focused thriller around this clever setpiece. The broad themes of sacrifice and "otherness" still resonate after the adventure is show more spent; it's a rare thing to have high-concept and pulp adventure work together so well. show less