It is supposed to be a Vietnam allegory - Haldeman served there, as a combat engineer. It shows. (The Forever War - Joe Haldeman)

Member Name: jdkane

Product:	The Forever War - Joe Haldeman
Date:	14/11/00 (240 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Characterisation; the strongest point, almost uniquely well done in its field, A

Disadvantages: Imagination; derivative, incomplete what if's; C-

For the totally uninitiated, the war of the title is a conflict between humans and aliens with whom we have, until the very end, no communication other than missile fire with; unknown and inexplicable enemy. It begins sometime in 1996 - he explains that in the foreword, it all makes sense, don't worry about it - and lasts well into the 32nd century, for the character participants at least, because of relativistic dilation. The participants are sent out to fight Taurans while behind them the society they're supposed to be fighting for changes completely, faster than they can comprehend.

It is supposed to be a Vietnam allegory - Haldeman served there, as a combat engineer. It shows.

The war is a hoax, essentially; deliberately provoked by terran military command to preserve their way of life. Science- fictional generals are continually doing this. In real life this is not far short of insane - depending on the theory that you can actually have a war which changes nothing except with regard to the participants, which is never true as long as there are organisations of any sort capable of and willing to react to circumstances - and it doesn't even explain what he's satirising.

What makes it worse is that in Haldeman's world they may actually have a point. Industry, employment, and the general commonweal depends on the production of war materiel, as the hero discovers on his first and only return to earth; a few brilliant but superfluous people are an easily made sacrifice for a situation that ensures this, especially as they're never likely to lose. He sets up an insane situation so well that, for those involved, to do anything other than what they are doing would be criminal incompetence. Under those circumstances, why not provoke a war? Unless you badly misjudge an opponent - and they don't - it's viable.

What does not gel is the continuation of the war through such massive changes in society. At
one point, terran society resorts to eugenics, and compulsory homosexuality as a means to prevent spurious freebirths and as a means of birth control; later full- scale monocrop cloning, indefinite numbers of copies of one man and one woman. What end this is supposed to serve in itself beats the smeg out of me. Why they should continue the war- and in fact, they don't, the monocrop- clones- short of sheer inability to make it stop is a mystery.

A key part of having believable SF technology is having otherwise intelligent participants who themselves believe in it.He does that well, but otherwise I can't imagine where the 'faultless' comment of Hamilton's comes from. So much is driven by metaphorical needs rather than the possible (or, as ever, plausible- given- that...)I'm sure he could be much more rigorous if he set out to. Stasis fields are particularly quibbleable. Relativity is his chief tool for manipulating the causality of the war. Ships use effectively instantaneous collapsar jumps, but "Maneuvering into collapsar insertion will put us about three hundred years behind Stargate's calendar by the time we reach" their destination. Horseshit, to put it bluntly. The ship in question can pull 25 'g'- drive system named as 'tachyon drive' but undefined. That's thirteen days twenty-one hours twenty minutes to lightspeed in it's own frame of reference. When all's said and done, relativity is asymptotic. You only start hitting ratios of external to interior time of twenty to one or so up past ninety- nine point nine percent of lightspeed. As Clarke said once, what's three orders of magnitude between friends? Even so, this is a gap.

I'm wary of agreeing with general opinion and surface appearance that it is intended as a satire on Vietnam; it would actually sit better as a satire on the first world war, especially given the casualty rates he quotes. Most importantly, when all&
#39;s said and done, the book has a happy ending. With reservations, especially for those of the liberal persuasion who like individuality, but the only people Vietnam had a happy ending for were the Chinese- who never liked the Vietnamese anyway and were glad to see America fall flat on it's face- and the Japanese, who took advantage of the nosedive in American confidence to hand out a shattering defeat in their own everlasting economic war.

Earlier comment notwithstanding, it is far and away one of the best novels of military science fiction you're going to be able to find. I doubt it's worth some of the high praise heaped on it- comparisons to Catch- 22 do it no good whatsoever, and there are better novels to have been forged in the experience of Vietnam; Tim O'Brien's works for one author and Bao Ninh for one outstanding novel, but the more restrictive a definition you put on it, the more it seems to stand out among it's contemporaries. As an unqualified 'novel', more than competent, but not much more. As a war novel, apart from the setting it is second rank, not first. (But that way you take slightly longer to be mown down, perhaps long enough to duck.) As SF, much more competently executed than most, but too closely correspondent to reality (as may well be inevitable with satire), failing to follow it's own 'what if...'s through; as military SF, one of the very few examples to achieve the qualities inherent in a genuine war novel, head and shoulders above the competition.

Ratings;
Imagination; derivative, incomplete what if's; C-
Science; hocus- pocus, but internally consistent; C+
Scene- setting; very good, B+
Characterisation; the strongest point, almost uniquely well done in its field, A

Overall; C+

Summary: