The Forever War

Joe Haldeman wrote a science fiction classic back in the 70s.

It was originally published as installments in the Science Fiction magazine Analog. Later it was published as a book and went on to win many awards and become quite well known.

My father subscribed to Analog, and I still do. I don't know if I read it originally in the magazine or as a book, but I know I used to have a dogeared copy of the book that I read several times. My brothers read it too, and we used to talk about it.

Recently, the author released an "Author's Preferred Version" of the book, as I heard on NPR from Nancy Pearl, author of the "Book Lust" series. Nancy is a librarian and prolific reader and has nice clean concise summaries of books that seldom fail to make me want to read the book.

So I went out and got the new version. It took me a day to read it.

Granted, I was sick (therefore immobile and not distracted) and it was familiar ground, but it was still impressive how smoothly the material flows in. A truly laminar work.

I did not know or realize until hearing Nancy Pearl's review that Joe Haldeman was a Viet Nam vet. He wrote the novel because of his experiences, which taught him that war is stupid and senseless. The chapters he was asked to remove and rewrite from the original version were deemed too depressing. Haldeman had great difficulty getting a publisher because they all feared that the public did not want another war protest book. Good fiction can divorce itself from the original inspiration and outline basic truths in a way that make you see universal rules that underlie our existence. I believe Haldeman achieved that with this book. I found myself throwing his thought template over the current situation, the Iraq War to see if any truisms emerged from it. There are definitely lessons that apply to all three wars, Viet Nam, Iraq, and Haldeman's fictional Forever War.

Beyond the depth of the work, there are also some very compelling and fun elements to it. I use the word fun even though it is somewhat inappropriate, but being a technophile, I love the gagets in this book.

While the stasis field, grenade launchers, missiles, gigawatt lasers, and immense ships with all their fighters and drones are interesting, the apex of his creation is the fighting suit. Part spacesuit and part exoskeleton, the suits tranform soldiers into their own tanks. They could be camoflagued with the flick of a wrist and enabled the soldier to see at any magnification or illumination he needed. They had unlimited food and recycling capabilities, emergency medical features, high tech communications, and finger lasers. Best of all, they had strength amplification circuits, so a person could leap incredibly high or crush things with their hands. Just this week, there was an item in the news about the military working to develop a soldier exoskeleton - possibly inspired by Haldeman's work? The other coolest thing about the story was that soldiers that lost a limb were taken to a hospital planet called Heaven and had their limbs regrown. Stem cell technology of the future.

Overpopulation, birth control, homosexuality, mind control, time dialation, future shock, and the inherent violence of the human species are all woven together in the story.

And it has possibly the most touching love letter I've read in the last chapter. So I would highly recommend this classic to anyone that enjoys a good action story, a good war story, or a good mirror to society and the human condition.