The Forever War was republished by Millennium books in 1999 as part of their SF Masterworks series, and this edition includes an authors note about the novel. Haldeman begins by saying that this edition is the definitive version, and that originally The Forever War was rejection by eighteen publishers before being accepted by St. Martin's Press.

The general reaction at the time was that it was a good book, but nobody wanted to read a book about the Vietnam war. He also says that after all this time, many people reading it don't see the relationship to Vietnam at all, and I have to admit that if I hadn't read him saying that, I wouldn't have had a clue.

As a piece of science fiction, it is certainly satisfying. Written in the first person, it is driven by the main character, Mandella, and follows his experiences during a series of increasingly bizarre time periods. Drafted to fight an alien species, called "Taurans", one of the most intelligent and healthy people on earth, he goes through combat repeatedly, each mission taking him further from his own time as the travel through space dilates time.

During the course of the novel, Mandella encounters radical shifts in both technology and society. Each time he gets aboard a ship, he knows that by the time he reaches his destination, everything he knows will have changed. Yet he still has the human capacity to be surprised and confused by the changes. It is his viewpoint and his feelings during the course of the novel that make this such an amazing read, and Haldeman captures the disorientation and disappointment with a talent that helps the reader to relate to Mandella's feelings.