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The Forever War

This book won both the Hugo and Nebula awards for best novel in 1975, and personally, I don't really understand why; I found it very disappointing.

The Forever War focuses on an interstellar war between humanity and an alien race known as the Taurans. Although a form of FTL travel involving "collapsars" exists, the method is essentially a form of natural "jump gate", and getting to the gate involves relativistic travel. The soldiers fighting the war, therefore, age only months while years or centuries pass back on Earth. The thrust of the book, therefore, is exploring how the human psyche deals with returning to such a changed world, and, secondarily, how the nature of the combat - and of the soldiers - changes over centuries. My basic gripe with the book is that although it seems like a good start, it falls far short of reaching its potential.

The book started losing me in its earliest sections, in which the protagonist, Private William Mandella, is being trained in basic combat equipment and techniques by UNEF, the armed forces. The early chapters focus almost entirely on the nuts-and-bolts of the training, with a few wry comments on army life, and provide very little background against which we can measure Mandella's life and changing circumstances. Although we learn a bit about his family when he returns to Earth later on, we don't really learn what he's being forced to give up, being pushed into the army like this. Maybe in the 70s, in the late days of Vietnam, this was taken for granted, but my generation missed Vietnam.

As does Robert Silverberg's The Stochastic Man (also nominated for the 1975 Hugo), The Forever War represents something that seems increasingly common: A book whose starting point is contemporary with the present day. This one begins in 1997, at which point humanity has already developed interstellar travel and some rather nasty killing devices. This book posits a rather more liberal 'present day' than Silverberg's book does, and perhaps seems even more anachronistic because of it.

Sex is omnipresent in the book, and in the earliest chapters fraternization among the enlisted men and women is allowed and even encouraged (being, I suppose, something to do during long trips in space that doesn't require any extra luggage). I'm by no means opposed to sexual practices different from my own preferences, but there was something about it that bugged me. I think it was the homogeneity of the people involved, that everyone seemed to accept widespread partner-swapping and the occasional hundred-person orgy. Did Haldeman really think that things would change that much in 20 years? Certainly such practices were evident in the 60s and 70s (or so I'm told), but this degree of acceptance seems beyond the pale.

Mandella's main anchor in his life is Marygay Potter, his closest friend and lover. While their romance and their eventual separation is a powerful element in The Forever War, it seems like little of the texture and richness that could have been there actually made it into print. When they return from their mission, having aged a few months while 30 years passed on Earth, we meet Mandella's mother and brother, and see some of the changes that have occurred on Earth, in clothing and outlook and a few rather brutal social developments (including a tiered medical system in which some people are eligible for no treatment whatsoever). This particular section is one of the most vivid and well-realized in the book, and is the most successful at driving home what it would really be like to simply step out of civilization for a moment, and come back to find 30 years have passed. But although Mandella and Potter are ready to quit the army, they're forced back in, and on some (not entirely convincing) level, they don't seem to mind. It seems like Haldeman missed a big chance to let his characters try to work out a new life - or at least to try and fail - in the new world, and perhaps then to have it taken away from them, or even to decide on their own that they had to re-enlist (for whatever reason).

Indeed, the book glosses over some of its ideas. Although hundreds of years pass, the basic fighting techniques seem to change little; some new technology is introduced, such as a stasis field generator within which no technology can operate, but the basic infantry-with-air-support method still reigns. Earth eventually turns into a bioengineered culture where heterosexuality is considered deviant, and Mandella ends up commanding a platoon of people who consider him a pervert, although there's actually fairly little hard evidence of that. (There is one scene where a rather drunk lesbian offers herself to him, but the book shies away from pursuing that avenue of emotional turmoil. A pity, since it's one of the few really hard personal decisions that Mandella has to make.)

Ultimately, of course, the war ends, and although in some books the resolution to the war might have made me throw the book against the wall, the war is really subsidiary in this story, having been rather faceless and generic. But as with the rest of the book, I feel that if the war had been made more unique, and if the aliens had been given real motives for fighting, and Mandella had had to face those motives and draw some of his own conclusions, it would have been more satisfying. As it is, the motives behind the war are brushed off in a cynical, but essentially lighthearted, manner.

So Mandella finally returns home, and tries to find a place for himself, and that place is carved out neatly and cleanly, in the last three pages of the book. Although it's a nice storybook ending, it left me feeling quite empty. Which can be said for the book as a whole; there's a lot to consider, between the lines, but The Forever War doesn't really take the time to consider much of it.

Forever Peace

Forever Peace is not a sequel to The Forever War, except possibly in a thematic sense. Rather than considering how soldiers deal with war, it focuses on people who stumble onto a way to create a lasting peace through technological means.

In the 21st century, the world has been divided into two camps: The "Alliance" - essentially the United States and its allies - who have the prosperity of a technological culture, and the "Ngumi", who are essentially the third world, exploited and oppressed by the Alliance. Actually, the relationship between the two sides is largely implied, except that they are at war: The Alliance employing its huge technological edge to try to control the Ngumi, fighting an ongoing war against guerrillas on the Ngumi's home ground, a war the Ngumi cannot win but perhaps cannot lose, either.

The Alliance's technological edge are "Solderboys", large, nearly-indestructible robots which are controlled by humans who can "jack in" to a computer system and operate the robots from hundreds or thousands of miles away. The operators - "mechanics" - tend to be intelligent and educated, and are often draftees. The process of becoming "jacked" has a high failure rate (about 10%, many of whom die or are crippled), but it allows the members of a Soldierboy unit to be intimately linked with each other; what one knows, everyone else knows.

Julian Class is a mechanic and a physicist. His girlfriend Amelia Harding and a colleague of hers stumble onto the fact that the largest supercollider ever built - being constructed in orbit around Jupiter - has a good chance of triggering another Big Bang, thereby wiping out humanity (and everything else). Meanwhile, Marty Larrin - who invented jacking - has discovered that if a human is jacked with other people for more than 16 days, they become instant pacifists, unable to kill another human except in self-defense. The third leg of this triangle is a quasi-Christian cult called the Hammer of God, who not only believe in the world's imminent demise, but believe they must aid it in coming about. Naturally, they are profoundly interested in seeing the Jupiter project come on-line.

Julian and his friends reason out that even if the supercollider is shut down, the technology to create it still exists, so doing so it not a permanent solution. Only by pacifying through jacking (the term "humanizing" is used) all of humanity can our survival be assured. A small fraction of the population will not be humanized, of course, but they could perhaps be watched or isolated.

The first third of the book is largely set-up: We see what it's like to be a soldierboy, and what the war in Ngumi territory is like. Class has never actually killed before - he's mostly been used in reconnaissance and search-and-seize missions (the sort of thing for which knockout gas suffices). He eventually does commit a murder, which bring out his suicidal tendencies. The main plot doesn't really come to the fore until halfway through.

The book is mostly involved in the technical details of carrying out the humanization plan, and the covert conflict between the humanizers and the Hammer of God agents. Nods are made toward various moral issues: The notion of forcibly humanizing someone, the possibility of killing 2% of the world's population to save the other 98%, and so forth. It all seems a little too pat, the threat of ultimate annihilation being too easy an excuse. Put the notion of humanization up against the fuzzier problem of an endless war with endless suffering (but only for some people), and the dilemma becomes substantially stickier.

The book is at its best when dealing with Class himself. Class is black, and Amelia is white and older than him. Class had previously had a close relationship with a woman in his Soldierboy platoon, who had died, and as Amelia is unjacked their relationship is by definition not as close. They have an open relationship, but when she actually exercises that openness Julian is of course profoundly upset. His problems with being a soldierboy define the whole mechanic experience for the reader. And his evolution from his relatively humble beginnings through his experiences as the humanizing plan comes to fruition - he is never humanized, so he's one of the few on the team who is still able to kill - is also interesting.

Ultimately, although the book is quite tense and an exciting adventure in the second half, it all seems a little too simple, and a little too adventurous and not philosophical enough. Forever Peace is certainly more focused than The Forever War, but it, too, leaves a number of issues dangling. In my opinion, it's the better book, but it still seems lacking.