★★★★★ Classic anti-military novel

The Forever War

Joe Haldeman

If you know anything about The Forever War, you probably know that it is a classic Anti-War science fiction novel. And if you read science fiction more than casually, you probably *have* heard of The Forever War. It won the trifecta: Hugo, Nebula, and Locus awards for best novel. And it deserves the awards.

I read it because of the awards, not long after it came out in 1974. Now of course it was not the first antiwar book I had read. War is easy to be against, and the list of authors who have written novels that condemn war is very, very long. What took me by surprise, however, was that The Forever War is not just an antiwar book -- it is a book that condemns and mocks the armed forces. As a teenager this was new to me.

It is now, fifty years later, almost taboo to do what Joe Haldeman does here. For many Americans the only acceptable attitude towards the men and women of the military is abject unquestioning worship. One is not allowed to suggest that the military is a huge government burocracy, and like any organization so large, it probably includes many stupid people. (Also many smart people and a few geniuses.) In a nation where politicians demonstrate fiscal virtue by taking food out of the mouths of children (literally), it is still politically almost impossible to give the military any less money than it asks for.

Now, if you signal to a large burocracy that its budget is untouchable, you can bet there will be waste and corruption. And of course there is. There was waste and corruption in the Athenian navy, and in the World War II US Air Force (see David Fairbank White's Wings of War) and in the forces that fought in Vietnam (see Neil Sheehan's A Bright Shining Lie).

It is the last that is most relevant to The Forever War. Haldeman served in Vietnam, and saw the stupidity and corruption close-up.

The Forever War was a difficult novel to publish. In his Author's note, Haldeman tells us that it was rejected by 18 publishers. Even in our post-Vietnam funk, when Americans were disgusted with themselves and their armed forces, a novel that so nakedly condemned and ridiculed the military was not an easy sell. Ben Bova serialized it in Analog and eventually successfully shopped it to St Martin's Press, which had never before published adult science fiction. The hardback published by St Martin's and the paperback eventually derived from it were the slightly butchered version that had appeared in serial form in Analog. That's the version I read fifty years ago.

Haldeman describes this new book as "the definitive version of The Forever War". It includes the novella You Can Never Go Back, which Bova rejected. It also includes a new Foreword by John Scalzi, which is just as good as you would expect a Foreword from Scalzi to be.

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