Review: The Forever War by Joe Haldeman

A book with a lot of interesting parts that don’t quite combine into a perfect whole.

What I enjoyed:

• This is one of the first Sci-Fi stories I’ve seen that seriously considers the impact of relativity on interstellar battles. If a soldier travels at near light speed for a few months to get to some distant battle, then when they return, they may find that decades or centuries may have passed back on earth. Moreover, when two opposing armies travel at near light speed to fight each other, it’s possible one of them ends up technologically years ahead of the other, depending on who traveled for how long, due to these same relativistic effects. Imagine an army heading out in the 19th century, traveling for a couple years at near light speed, to arrive at their destination and find that their opponent has 21st century weapons.

• The book talks a lot about how the world a soldier returns to is very different than the world he left. The book makes this very concrete due to relativistic effects, but this is a real phenomenon in our world. Everything can change during the few years a soldier is a way, including the soldier himself.

• The book is also an obvious allegory for the fact that wars are pointless. It makes this point in a somewhat heavy-handed way, but there is a lot of truth there. I believe Haldeman was in the Vietnam war, so it makes sense he’d write a book around this theme.

• There are some fun sci-fi concepts in the book. The “stasis fields” were especially fun, as they make fast particle weapons (bullets) and energy weapons (lasers) unusable, which forces everyone back into primitive, melee-style combat with swords and bows. There were also some fun discussions of training soldiers with post-hypnotic suggestions and the difficulty of living on distant planets that are at close to absolute zero.

Parts I didn’t enjoy:

• There was almost no character development whatsoever. Most of the characters feel bland and lifeless and they do not change in any meaningful way.

• The military in this story allows both sexes and all the soldiers sleep with each other, changing partners on a near-daily basis, with apparently no drama or discipline problems whatsoever. It sounds like a high-school boy’s fantasy.

• The story takes place over hundreds of years, but other than a new weapons here and there, it doesn’t seem like technology changes much. That seems a bit silly. Imagine a person from the 1600’s visiting the world today; cars, rockets, phones, computers, and all the rest would be unrecognizable to them! However, the soldiers in this book come back after hundreds of years, and while the social and political landscape is very different, it seems like the technology of the world hasn’t progressed at all, or even regressed. As technological progress is accelerating exponentially, if you left today and came back around the year 2300, either the world would be entirely gone because we blew ourselves up, or the technology would have advanced so far as to be utterly incomprehensible to you.

• The “twist” ending is completely unsurprising.

Rating: 4 stars