The Bottom Line: Read this book if you find the idea of time travel through space travel groovy. No other particularly good reasons to read it I can think of.
Science fiction attracts a lot of criticism that it rightly deserves. Oooo controversy, I can just see the comments now, but hear me out. There are huge tracts of science fiction which concoct fantastic explanations for this that and the other impossible thing, but then completely ignore this that and the other rational consequence of the explanation. Naturally, most people think this is a huge bag of bananas and refuse to have anything to do with it. Can’t blame them, really a lot of the time.
Case in point: very fast space travel.
We are all familiar with the manner in which the Star Ship(s) Enterprise leave the speed of light far behind them, and coast across the galaxy in the blink of an eye. Fair enough. Kinda cool.
Unfortunate consequence: thousands of years are likely to have passed when you reach your destination. Physics reveals that any object traveling faster than light is also traveling forward in time, very quickly relative to everything that isn’t.
Most unfortunate consequence: A short trip to the Crab Nebula in the Enterprise just to do a little spot of vacationing would see you return to earth hundreds of years later to find everyone you ever knew dead, your bank balance overflowing due to compound interest, and language moved along so much you’d be lucky to have the teller understand you saying:
“Hello, yes, I’d like to make an unfeasibly large withdrawal from my account please, and can you direct me to the local cemetery?”
These unfortunate consequences were not overlooked by Joe Haldeman when he wrote “The Forever War.”
One of a small elite group of novels to win both the Hugo and Nebula awards for best novel, “The Forever War” tells the tale of Private William Mandella, drafted into the first warfare between human and aliens, in the early twenty-first century. Newly equipped with technology to exploit wormholes in space, mankind travels huge interstellar distances in an instant, but not without the obligatory time dilation effect. From their first voyage, Private Mandella and his comrades become anachronistic remnants of a bygone age, but the war rages on. Throughout the book we see the war escalate, Mandella’s time frame advance, and his connection to his own personal history become more and more tenuous. Quite an idea!
In terms of plot construction, this book is fairly straightforward, and can be summarized thus; Mandella is inducted into the military rules of engagement of the time period he finds himself in. He then takes a voyage to the location where he is to engage the enemy and dutifully does so. He then returns to Earth which has changed vastly in his absence, is promoted, and turns around and does the whole thing again, this time with a higher rank, a different period of time, and greater technology than he had before. Phew!
During all of this, Mandella does his best to have a fairly elementary version of a love affair with one of his fellow soldiers. Apparently this is the continuity bit, if love affairs happen to be your bag.
So much for the plot. So what did I think of this book? Underwhelming. Here are a few reasons why.
Too brave, more than one time
This book dares to tread waters notorious for their treachery. Namely, the far future. When an author takes it upon themselves to portray not a near future, or an alien world, but our own society telescoped far into the future, anachronism creeps surreptitiously into the writing all too easily. To keep the future fantastic, one has to scrupulously avoid artifice from present day technology (this is a seventies book) that can quickly sully the imaginative waters of anyone reading your book more than a couple of years after publication. Haldeman’s future, even into the 31st century, is still populated by monitor screens that slowly warm up with a little green dot in the center of the screen. Telephones are still plugged into the wall and made of plastic, and there are many other minutiae that shatter the reader’s illusion too often for he or she to be carried far from reality.
Gay or not gay, that (should not) be the question!
I believe this is some kind of odd attempt at political correctness on the part of the author. Everyone in the future is gay, and good old Mandella becomes a frightful anachronism in his heterosexuality. The issue of sexual orientation and societies position on its importance makes for great science fiction material. Alas, not in the hands of Joe Haldeman. Haldeman has society becoming actually more sexually polarized because it is supposedly less sexually polarized. Because the protagonist is heterosexual in this story, he is an oddity. Read “Time Enough for Love” by Robert Heinlein for a better treatment of this issue. In Heinlein’s future, everyone has their queer and straight moments, and nobody gives a rat’s a$$, and the author describes the love but sees no reason to comment on how the orientation of the partners bears on it at all. Like many essentially limited imaginations, Haldeman seems to believe that switching the polarity of a popular prejudice is the same thing as not having it. Here Heinlein shows the way as a competent future philosopher on many occasions….the best way to deal with present prejudices is to have your story clearly illustrate that prejudice went the way of all flesh.
I will love you forever, but only a bit
This author cannot write romance. Neither can he really describe affairs of the heart, nor very often express any emotion that does not directly concern combat. I found the love story element of this novel especially weak and unbelievable. I had to do a bit of wading to get through this book at times, and upon finishing it, I realized the reason was that I didn’t care what happened to the characters within it, they were so thinly drawn. See anything by Arthur C Clarke for a good illustration of how to recognize you can't write love stories and leave it to those who can. Know thyself.
And I care because……..?
Again, to reiterate the main fault with this book, I just didn’t ever get to where I cared. The aliens are described as boring copycats of mankinds technology who never really got the hang of being in a war. Partly because of this, Forever War never really gets the hang of being much of a story. This novel was a vehicle for describing the many vagaries that would go along with time travel by hyperspace. This excellent idea for a story is let down by the story itself. Perhaps it would have made a better short story. Personally, I thought it a weak candidate for the double-whammy of Hugo and Nebula, clearly it was a slow year, or the judges were perhaps impressed that someone writing in science fiction was dealing with ALL the physics of the situation!
I am reticent to recommend this book too highly. When I was one third of the way through it, I was wondering when it would end.
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