The Forever War by Joe Haldeman

Review by Nicholas Whyte

This is the seventeenth in a series of reviews of those pieces of written science fiction and fantasy which have won both the Hugo and Nebula awards. I have been writing these in alphabetical order by title, and

thus happens to come immediately after its sort-of sequel,

. Two shorter pieces, Fritz Leiber's

and Roger Zelazny's

, also won the Hugo and Nebula double that year. Other novels shortlisted for both awards against

included Roger Zelazny's

, Alfred Bester's

aka

, and Robert Silverberg's

- while these are by no means duds, none is their authors' greatest work either; the Hugo and Nebula voters were right to pick

.

William Mandella is a physics graduate, drafted in the year 1997 to fight an interstellar war against the unknown Tauran enemy. Because the battlefields themselves are light-years away, Mandella spends most of the book slipping forward into the future thanks to time dilation, and thus becoming progressively more alienated from the society which he was recruited to serve. But he falls in love with a fellow soldier (the army of 1997 and later years being gender-balanced) and despite all obstacles they get back together. The book ends with a birth announcement from the happy couple - a narrative closure which is also used by Mary Gentle at the end of her medieval fantasy war novel, Ash: A Secret History.

The sequences portraying life as a soldier, in training or in a combat situation, are gripping and unforgettable. Haldeman has put a lot of his experiences as an actual soldier in the Vietnam war into the book. William is his own middle name, and Mandella almost an anagram of Haldeman (see his interview with Spaced Out, the Australian gay and lesbian sf club). Mandella's lover has Haldeman's wife's maiden name, Marygay Potter. The two colossal strengths of the book are the portrayal of the psychological experience of combat, and the depiction of the progressive alienation of the soldiers from the rest of humanity, culminating in the awful revelation that the war was basically a mistake.

As a civilian veteran of Balkan and Irish conflicts myself, I'm not unfamiliar with the psychological effects of war on the participants, and Haldeman gets it right. In a sense the protagonists of the Forever War are relatively fortunate in that there seem to be very few civilian casualties directly resulting from the conflict. Not that they see it that way, as the casualty rate among military participants is huge, and our hero gains rapid promotion merely for staying alive (though as a highly intelligent graduate he must have been officer material anyway). (Brandon Ray subsequently pointed out on rec.arts.sf.written that this isn't necessarily so, since all the recruits were enlisted by the Elite Conscription Act.)

The military stuff seemed well thought out. I particularly liked the gimmick of the stasis field, within with electricity doesn't work so our soldiers have to resort to edged weapons. The science behind it may well be rubbish but the military implications were sensibly developed. (And anyone who doubts that the military could possibly jump at shadows to such an extent as to wage war against an enemy that wasn't in fact an enemy should consider such recent events as the US military's hysterical reaction to the International Criminal Court and its bizarre fixation with National Missile Defense, a project that will cost vast amounts of money to defend against a threat that is vanishingly unlikely to transpire.)

However despite the undeniable power of the core message of the book, much of the packaging is flawed. The book begins in a world where interstellar space travel has been developed by 1997, which now seems optimistically premature to the 21st century reader. The first edition, which actually won the Hugo and Nebula awards, features a section set in a future Geneva where the UN is now based - a Geneva where the local population has suddenly started speaking German! And although there may some day be a gender-balanced army which tolerates soft drug use, encourages other ranks to say "Fuck you, Sir!" to officers, and enforces (hetero)sexual activity among its recruits, this seems as unlikely now as it must have done in 1975.

The book's biggest problem - and this has often been acknowledged by Haldeman - is its handling of sexuality. In a year when Samuel R. Delany's Dhalgren, Joanna Russ's The Female Man, and Robert Silverberg's The Stochastic Man were pushing the boundaries of the portrayal of sex in science fiction, The Forever War's take on the issue seems rather unimaginative. The 1997 army enforces one-on-one heterosexual activity, with daily rotation of partners, among its personnel, none of whom appear to be particularly upset by this. A few decades later, the entire world has become homosexual as a means of population control, which seems rather disproportionate. Mandella sticks to his heterosexual guns, and does not appear in the least tempted to try it the other way (unlike the hero of Frederik Pohl's Gateway which also won both Hugo and Nebula, two years later).

And the ending, where our hero retrieves his lost love while the rest of the human race has surrendered its identity to a race of bisexual telepathic clones, seemed to me on first reading simply silly. I may be being unfair to the author here. Haldeman retorts in the introduction to "A Separate War", in the Robert Silverberg-edited collection Far Horizons, that:

The Forever War does not have a happy ending. Marygay and William do get back together - the book ends with the birth announcement of their first child - but they're together on a prison planet, preserved as genetic curiosities in a universe where the human race has abandoned its humanity in a monstrous liaison with its former enemy.

That's all very well as an explanation (twenty years on) of what was in the author's mind when he wrote it, but it doesn't really come across on the printed page of the book where the happy ending appears to be the point of the narrative. And it isn't sufficient, to this reader anyway, to justify the proliferation of homosexuality followed by the telepathic clones as a part of the metaphor for the alienation of Mandella from the rest of the human race; by today's standards this is either naive or offensive.

To an extent we should forgive the book its anachronisms; we still enjoy Shakespeare's Julius Caesar even though his depiction of Roman life (with clocks, hats and doublets) is rather different from ours. The flaws are real, but the passion is real as well. The Forever War is not a timeless classic, but it is a classic of its own time, and will no doubt continue to be read for its passion rather than its predictive accuracy. And after all, sf would be a very boring (and small) genre if it was actually rated on its ability to predict the future!

Other reviews of The Forever War on the web:

HC88 of the Maoist International Movement has a typically provocative though positive take on the book.

Mark Wightman, Ian Parnham, "Max", Matt T. Reynolds, R.F. Briggs and Megan C. "Raven" Morris liked it a lot.

"Josh" just liked it.

Beth Adele, Cheryl Morgan, Vamsi Nath and Russell Codd found much to like but share my doubts about the sexuality issues.

Robert Shiels, Steve Troy, Eric Lindh and Steven H Silver liked the war bits and the anti-war message.

Clinton Lawrence and Lisa DuMond liked the war bits and the sexuality metaphor.

Bill Sheehan, Aaron Hughes, Nick Gifford and Brett Bligh particularly picked up on the theme of alienation.

J.D. Kane liked the war bits but not the science or the politics.

Jandy Clarke didn't like the war bits but liked the love story.

Daniel Wright thought the ending a little pat.

Steve Parker and Michael Rawdon didn't like it but explain why interestingly.

Orrin Judd seemed to have read a different book.

David J. Parker has written a devastating parodic five-line summary.

See also the NVP Book Circle discussion and the Lambda Sci Fi discussion.

The next review in this series will be of Arthur C. Clarke's Hugo and Nebula winner, The Fountains of Paradise.



The Forever War won the 1976 Hugo Award for Best Novel

Other novels shortlisted for Hugo:

, by Roger Zelazny;

, by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle;

aka

aka

, by Alfred Bester; and

, by Robert Silverberg.

Other winners of 1976 Hugos: "Home Is the Hangman" (novella) by Roger Zelazny; "The Borderland of Sol" (novelette) by Larry Niven; "Catch that Zeppelin!" by Fritz Leiber.

The Forever War won the 1975 Nebula Award for Best Novel

Other 1975 nominees for Best Novel:

, by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle;

, by Samuel R. Delany;

, by Joanna Russ;

, by Poul Anderson;

aka

aka

, by Alfred Bester;

, by Michael Bishop;

, by Marion Zimmer Bradley;

, by Italo Calvino;

, by Arthur Byron Cover;

, by E. L. Doctorow;

, by Tanith Lee;

, by Katherine MacLean;

, by Barry N. Malzberg;

, by Vonda N. McIntyre;

, by Robert Silverberg;

, by Ian Watson; and

, by Roger Zelazny.

Other winners of 1975 Nebulas: "Home Is the Hangman" (novella) by Roger Zelazny; "San Diego Lightfoot Sue" (novelette) by Tom Reamy; "Catch that Zeppelin!" by Fritz Leiber.

Other awards

Winner of 1976 Ditmar Award

Winner of 1976 Locus Poll for Best Novel

Eighth place in 1975 Locus Poll for Best Novel (beaten by The Dispossessed , by Ursula Le Guin)

, by Ursula Le Guin) 18th place in 1987 Locus Poll for All Time Best SF Novel

12th place in 1998 Locus Poll for All Time Best SF Novel before 1990 (sic)

Novel rankings

Ranks of Hugo and Nebula nominated novels of 1975/76in

,

, version of 26 September 2002 (NB I have now added amazon.com sales rank, as of 25 September 2004, as a point of comparison):

Cooke rank Amazon rank

0174 625,939 Doorways in the Sand, by Roger Zelazny 0222 20,723 The Forever War, by Joe Haldeman 0295 24,343 The Mote in God's Eye, by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle 0622 283,623 Inferno, by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle 0676 595,017 The Heritage of Hastur, by Marion Zimmer Bradley 1198 41,706 Dhalgren, by Samuel R. Delany 1460 3,325 Invisible Cities, by Italo Calvino 1746 524,184 The Birthgrave, by Tanith Lee 1789 1,438,609 The Embedding, by Ian Watson 1805 131,813 The Female Man, by Joanna Russ 1920 1,052,492 The Computer Connection aka The Indian Giver aka Extro, by Alfred Bester 2235 1,770,673 The Stochastic Man, by Robert Silverberg 2596 1,821,870 The Exile Waiting, by Vonda N. McIntyre 2935 1,398,359 The Missing Man, by Katherine MacLean 3311 - A Funeral for the Eyes of Fire, by Michael Bishop 3885 1,519,188 A Midsummer Tempest, by Poul Anderson - 46,979 Ragtime, by E.L. Doctorow - 2,463,950 Guernica Night, by Barry N Malzberg - - Autumn Angels, by Arthur Byron Cover

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list of joint Hugo and Nebula winners | meta-review of the 2006 Hugo nominees | meta-review of the 2005 Hugo nominees | meta-review of the 2004 Hugo nominees | meta-review of the 2003 Hugo nominees | reviews of the 2002 Hugo nominees | thoughts on the 2000 Hugo nominations | all Hugo and Nebula winners | analysis of winners by age and year of birth | first time winners and gender balance

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