The Forever War

Science Fiction 3 Minutes

For some reason I had never read Joe Haldeman’s The Forever War, and recently decided to remedy that. Like most classic sci-fi novels, it’s a quick read, much shorter than most contemporary novels. It’s often been called a Vietnam veteran’s response to Robert A. Heinlein’s Starship Troopers. Haldeman himself disputes that, although he admits it’s heavily inspired by Vietnam, and overall much more antiwar than Heinlein’s story.

This novel originally came out in the early 1970s and is very much a product of its time.

William Mandela is a physics student in the 1990s drafted into the United Nations army in a war against an alien species: the “Taurans”. Unlike in previous wars, a high IQ is part of the criteria. The military wants elite fighters. Women are included, so in this imagined near future military, it’s a mixed force, with roughly half female.

As a morale boosting measure, the recruits in training are encouraged, even required, to have regular and promiscuous sex with their colleagues. Pot smoking is common and seen as just another recreational drug. And the automatic “Sir, yes sir!” chorus of obedience in previous generations is replaced with a “F— you, sir!” response, repeated with the same lack of enthusiasm.

After some training in Missouri, the recruits are shipped to a planet in the outer solar system called “Charon” (not to be confused with the moon of Pluto discovered years after this story was written). Here they learn to use an armored exoskeleton suit so prevalent in military sci-fi. The training is grueling and dangerous. Several recruits are killed. Eventually they graduate and are sent to their first posting.

Interstellar travel in this universe happens via “collapsars”, a type of naturally occurring wormhole naturally occurring wormholes between collapsars (black holes). [My thanks to Captain Button for the correction in the comments.] However the collapsars are often a substantial distance from local solar systems or each other, requiring months of travel time, typically reaching relativistic speeds. The result is that while the troops spend months in transit, years are passing at the bases and on Earth. The battles all seem to happen in solar systems near collapsar transit points.

The Taurans, when first encountered, don’t seem like very good fighters, but they learn quickly, and the war becomes a long slog.

When Mandella first gets back to base, he discovers that decades have passed. But he, his girlfriend, and many others are given a chance to cash out their backpay and return to civilian life, although they are warned that a lot has changed on Earth. When they take the cash out option, they get back to Earth in 2024, and discover that it is a dystopia, with overpopulation, sky high crime rates, society breaking down, and widespread misery. Mandella and his girlfriend eventually reenlist.

As the war drags on and the decades and centuries pile up, Earth becomes increasingly alien from the view of the older soldiers. Governments on Earth begin to encourage homosexuality as a means to keep the population under control, and eventually make it mandatory. Mandella, as one of the longest surviving soldiers, finds himself considered a sexual deviant by the new recruits.

There are some pretty good action and battle scenes in the book, but one theme throughout seems to be that military often doesn’t know what it’s doing. Also that it’s not the soldier’s friend. And that the future is going to be very strange by our standards, starting with the army a few years in the future, and getting progressively weirder as the story progresses.

Reading older sci-fi is always an interesting experience. In this book, we get to see a 1970s vision of what the 1990s and 2020s would be like, and how dominated that vision is by the preoccupations of 60s and 70s culture. Certainly our 2020s is far from perfect, but it’s a picnic compared to the nightmare presented in the book. Something for us to keep in mind when contemplating the predictions made today.

Obviously this book isn’t going to be everyone’s cup of tea, but I found it an interesting ride, worth considering if you’re looking for classic sci-fi to read.

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28 thoughts on “The Forever War”

    2. @selfawarepatterns.com For starters, it doesn't approach war in a glorifying way or just in any way that it considers it something useful or a solution to problems that can't be solved by other means, which the sub-genre, per force, is not keen on.

      Liked by 1 person

  2. @selfawarepatterns.com Did read it. Enjoyed it.

    " Wars are won not by a simple series of battles won, but by a complex interrelationship among mili-
    tary victory, economic pressures, logistic maneuvering, access to the
    enemy's information, political postures–dozens, literally dozens of
    factors. " — The Forever War by Haldeman

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  3. @selfawarepatterns.com

    Nice review. One quibble: I think "collapsar" was an alternate name for what is now called a "black hole." In "The Forever War" if you fly your starship into the a black hole at just the right angle and speed, instead of getting spaghettified and sucked in, your ship gets flicked through hyperspace or something and emerges from another black hole elsewhere. They aren't the same as wormholes because you can go to different destinations, not only one.

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    1. That’s a good point. He never explicitly explains what a collapsar is, but I didn’t think to check if it was an actual astronomical term. Turns out it is. Thanks!

      Although wormholes still seem to be involved in some way. I ended up using “wormhole” based on a couple of mentions in the book, particularly this one:

      The time spent scooting down the wormhole from one collapsar to the next was always the same, independent of the distance.

      Haldeman, Joe. The Forever War (The Forever War Series) (p. 223). Open Road Media. Kindle Edition.

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  4. Haven’t read it for a very long time, but have read all the sequels. I don’t know whether following up on n iconic book with another is a good idea … but then I realize the author is doing what he does to make money!

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    1. I’ve thought about reading the sequels, but they seem to have different themes, and don’t seem to have the cache of the original. Maybe at some point. I’ve also tried some of Haldeman’s other stuff, and can take or leave it. Not that I have anything against authors trying to cash in on their work.

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  5. @selfawarepatterns.com same for me. Had overlooked & recently discovered/read.

    I really enjoyed the focus on social issues & human (or non) behaviours. Made me think quite a bit about stuff, which is always the sign of a good book.

    Confess I found the ending a bit "awww you've gone & spoilt it now" but a great read nonetheless.

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    1. I didn’t feel like the ending spoiled it, but it did feel a bit unearned, like it was bolted on to cap the story off with a happy ending. From a storytelling perspective, it might have been better if it had been foreshadowed in some manner.

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  6. @selfawarepatterns.com I listened to the audiobook some years ago. This is really an interesting book. They wanted to make a movie out of it.

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  7. @selfawarepatterns.com Interesting. There has been so much misunderstanding of the thesis of "Starship Troopers", and so much hype about "The Forever War", that I have never actually heard that Haldeman disputes that his book was ever meant as a response to Heinlein.

    "Starship Troopers" has long been incorrectly thought by far too many to be promoting militarism and even fascism, when it does nothing of the sort.

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    1. For Haldeman’s dispute, I’m going off of remarks he makes in an author’s note at the beginning of the latest edition of the book.

      It’s been decades since I read Starship Troopers, but I can see why people have the militarism take. Although I can also see an argument it was more about civic mindedness and engagement. Overall, I remember it much more pro-societal commitment than Forever War.

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  8. Oof, what’s with all the “… liked this!”?

    As I read your description I thought of Scalzi’s Old Man’s War and how he must have copied much of the premise of The Forever War. Lame, Scalzi.

    I’m struck by the failure of early sci-fi to guess prophetic time tables. Was this due to the swift tech and social changes experienced during the 50 & 60s? As reality unfolds, it’s obvious that thoughts of a visionary future will take decades, centuries longer than what was once envisioned. About the only tech advance that may live up to its hype is AI. If you write spec sci-fi these days and don’t include AI, you’ve failed at your job as prophet.

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    1. The “…like this” are coming in from the Fediverse plugin. I’ve been approving them because I wasn’t sure what else to do with them. They don’t show on the website. I didn’t realize until just now how they’re showing in the Reader. Sigh. I guess I just need to delete them.

      Scalzi claims he didn’t read Forever War before writing Old Man’s War. (He actually has a forward in this edition of The Forever War discussing the resemblance. He does admit he was heavily influenced by Starship Troopers and Heinlein overall.)

      I’m actually skeptical most of the AI predictions in sci-fi are going to be accurate. They often fill the role played by genies, demons, and gods in fantasy. Looking at Asimov’s old Robot books from the 1940/50s can be instructive. It assumed we’d put most or all our automation in the shape of humanoid robots. These days AI often get treated like ghosts in the machines (either benevolent or malevolent). It makes for entertaining stories, but I suspect poor predictions.

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        1. Did you have a particular story in mind on time dilation? The oldest I think I’ve read is Heinlein’s Time for the Stars, which was accurate enough for the actual time dilation, but introduced FTL telepathy between twins as a plot mechanism, an idea that probably seemed more plausible in the 1950s. Of course, Haldeman introduces wormholes between black holes. Card has relativistic travel in his fiction but mixes in Le Guin’s ansible concept.

          Diamond hard SF is pretty rare. Egan does it, but he’s definitely a rarity.

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          1. Just remembered Poul Anderson’s Tau Zero. Now that’s a relativistic thought experiment worth checking out if you haven’t read it. Some of the cosmology is dodgy, the the concept is pretty cool.

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          2. I suppose I was calling attention to the predictions regarding near-term decades. The 80s, 90s, oughts, teens, those decades, seen from the 50s and 60s that expected wild advances, but got diddly.

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          3. I know what you mean. Ones from my youth that jump to mind: Space 1999, 2001 A Space Odyssey, Rollerball. Blade Runner too, although it’s source material (Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep) originally took place in the 1990s. Something to keep in mind when reading contemporary fiction set a few decades in the future.

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  9. I often point to this as an example of why Sci-Fi should be taken seriously as literature. Using time dilation as a way to show how a soldier can never really go home… it’s just brilliant.

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