The Forever War

Joe Haldeman 1975 Buy from Amazon.com

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.

After the first mission, they return home, released from duty, to find that the entire world has changed, while it was only a few months of subjective time, it has been many years, and their parents and friends are old. Earth has been through a food crisis, and it is a much more violent and predatory place than it used to be. While visiting his lover, Marygay Potter, her parents are killed in a raid on their farm and the two of them decide to go back into the army. They had been offered their choice of assignments if they went back, and they chose to supervise training, but the moment they sign up, they are reassigned to combat.

When they receive their orders for their third mission they discover they will be separated. They both know that due to the time dilation effects, it’s unlikely that they will ever see each other again. By this point, they are amongst the very oldest veterans, most soldiers not surviving as long as they have, and it’s over 200 years in real time since they were first drafted.

When he reaches the base where he will start his new mission, Mandella learns that only a very few veterans and “incurables” are heterosexual, everyone is homosexual. He experiences the bemused “tolerance” of his subcommanders and the rank and file call him “the old queer”.

When Mandella again returns to earth he finds that the war is over and humanity has forever changed. Humans are now cloned, and every male is the same male, every female the same female. They are told that they are able to move to one of a few outposts that still have differentiated humans if they wish to. Mandella’s subcommanders have to deal with the idea that if they choose this, they will be reprogrammed to heterosexuality.

This novel was fascinating to me in a way that most war-based fiction is not. It dealt with the military aspects of the war in a believable way and showed the individuals dealing with the lifestyle in their own fashion. Mandella’s difficulties with returning to a civillian life after combat were driven home by the radical changes in society that occurred during his long absences, making it easy to relate to. It was a very enjoyable novel, and definitely worth picking up.

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