The Forever War (Joe Haldeman)

The Forever War
The Forever War series, Book 1
Joe Haldeman
St. Martin's Griffin
Fiction, Sci-Fi
**** (Good)

DESCRIPTION: William Mandella expected to become a physics professor when he got out of college. He didn't expect to be drafted. But the human interstellar colonization effort has made a startling, and terrifying, discovery: we are not alone in the universe, and the aliens - the Taurans - may well have just destroyed one of our ships. Wars in space require the best and brightest minds, capable of parsing the mind-bending physics of near-lightspeed travel and relativity, so William and other men and women found themselves in uniform, training for a war that will, thanks to time distortion from high speeds and the "collapsars" that allow near-instantaneous jumps across incalculable distances between stars, see them return to Earth decades, even centuries after departure... a planet they no longer recognize, even as war makes them half-unrecognizable to themselves.

REVIEW: Haldeman based this award-winning classic tale on his experiences in Vietnam, but the themes are (unfortunately) timeless. Modern civilization is warped around conflict and war and creating "others" to throw money and lives at, the war machine driving the economy. William's first commanders and trainers are veterans of Vietnam (the timeline has this war starting in the late 20th century; in a foreword, Haldeman says he had an opportunity to shift the dates when his "future" became obsolete, but chose to leave them, and in truth the year itself doesn't actually matter as the pattern repeats through human history), showing the clear through-line that war turns men and women into hammers, who will do everything it takes, even commandeer the reins of civilization, to ensure they never run out of nails to strike. As Mandella skips through time, he sees tactics change drastically, all in ways that seem designed to strip the "human" out of humanity. At the start, he and his fellow soldiers are motivated by implanted "hate" triggers, impossible scenarios of Taurans as baby-eating, raping butchers that are triggered when they head into combat: William knows it's impossible "soyashit", invented propaganda, but cannot stop himself from responding to it.
That summarizes his whole experience, forced to be a cog in a machine whose ultimate purpose is not victory, but the perpetuation of its own existence, feeding on lives and limbs. Along the way, the planet and species he's fighting to save become almost as alien as the Taurans, changes in language and technology and social mores leaving him feeling as lost as a Neanderthal in a modern city. At the start, women and men are treated as equals in uniform, though expected to regularly partner up in rotation for health and psychological reasons. Future generations, pressured by overpopulation, embrace the "homo lifestyle", and come to see William's heterosexuality as a deviation or outright perversion. (Haldeman, at least in this story, seems to consider sexual orientation a choice or social construct. Given the age of the work and the fact that it's intended to be part of William's growing disorientation as centuries pile up, portrayed as a character trait of William rather than a broader commentary on sexuality or gender, I decided to give this a qualified pass. This is, after all, a future in which brains are regularly wiped or reprogrammed, seemingly as casually as one reprograms a computer.) Though he hates killing and longs to be free, the war keeps pulling him back in, ultimately his only refuge as he drifts further out of touch with the rest of his species.
The story takes a while to get moving, wending through his training and the first disastrous encounter with the Taurans, and the meeting with fellow soldier Maryjay Potter - the woman he wants to spend the rest of his life with, assuming either of them survive long enough to build a life, and don't end up separated by time dilation and the width of the galaxy. Once in a while it gets a bit thick with the physics and tactics, but overall it moves fairly decently. The Forever War remains a fairly solid read; one can still see the mark of this story in many modern works.

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