The Forever War by Joe Haldeman
278 pages
Published 1974; expanded "author's preferred edition" published 1997
Read August 1
Rating: ★★★½ out of 5
Perhaps the most noteworthy thing about this book, to my mind, is how its elements continue to get duplicated in later science fiction. "Some of Them Closer" by Marissa Lingen, supposedly one of the best stories published in 2011 (according to Rich Horton, anyway), takes the same exact "readjustment to a new life on Earth after relative time dilation" storyline from the middle section of The Forever War. The much-celebrated twist at the end of Ender's Game -- the interstellar war was all a misunderstanding, because our two species had such different ways of looking at the universe! -- appears in almost exactly the same form here, eleven years earlier. (I would be surprised if that "twist" weren't prefigured even earlier, but I won't go searching.) No doubt other bits of this book "inspired" much subsequent military sci-fi, though so far in my experience only Lucius Shepard follows Haldeman's technique of using military sci-fi to suggest military adventurism might not be the best or most glamorous thing ever. To be fair, I haven't read much military sci-fi, however.
More problematic, of course, is the altered society Mandella so famously comes home to, with its UN-mandated "homolife." One could argue that Mandella is clearly a biased narrator, a stodgy reactionary despite his repeated claims of tolerance. That argument doesn't seem to hold up at the very end, though, when his buddy Charlie decides to get his conditioning switched to heterosexuality and go cruisin' for chicks with Mandella in the boondocks of the galaxy. That scene excepted, Haldeman's portrayal of homosexuality is about as positive and non-judgmental as I think you could find in mid-'70s mainstream sci-fi, a portrayal that doesn't get improved much until the late '80s or earliest '90s. That doesn't mean it's really a positive depiction in absolute terms, but to trot out my usual apology, for its time this book wasn't the worst around.
I think my amusement at the eternal inefficiency and general mulishness of military procedure and bureaucracy helped tip my opinion toward the positive.
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