{"id":2417,"date":"2003-03-25T13:57:08","date_gmt":"2003-03-25T20:57:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/defectiveyeti.com\/?p=2417"},"modified":"2003-03-25T13:57:08","modified_gmt":"2003-03-25T20:57:08","slug":"books-the-forever-war","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/defectiveyeti.com\/wordpress\/2003\/03\/25\/books-the-forever-war\/","title":{"rendered":"Books: The Forever War"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Science Fiction Book Club recently named their “50 Most Significant SF & Fantasy Books of the Last 50 Years<\/a>“. Now, I know as well as you do that these “Best Of!” lists are totally bogus, but I’ve been in the mood for lighter reading recently, and when I saw Joe Haldeman’s novel parked in the top half I recalled how many times this particular novel had been recommended to me over the years. Plus, given the current geopolitical situation, this seemed as good a time to read a book entitled The Forever War<\/a>. So I picked it up.<\/p>\n

As with most “classic” sci-fi works, this book has a gimmick, albeit a rather modest one. True to the name this is indeed a war novel, where the combat taking place is given as much ink as the characters. But the humans enbroiled in the The Forever War’s<\/i> interstellar struggle have to consider some elements that twentieth-century strategists were never forced to grapple with. Humans, it seems, have perfected near-light speed engines, and have discovered a network of wormholes which allow their fleets to travel instantly (from their point of view) to various points in the galaxy. Unfortunately, the theory of relativity mandates that while the troops may only experience a few months’ travel as they voyage to their destination, years will have passed in “real time”. A soldier might travel through a wormhold on a supply mission, drop off his cargo, return home through the same portal, and find that the Earth has utterly transformed during his “four month” sojourn.<\/p>\n

The story centers on William Mandella, a reluctant and mediocre soldier who is among the first drafted and sent to fight the mysterious race of Taurans. As one of the few of the initial force to survive, he returns to an Earth where dozens of years have passed and finds himself heralded as one of the most senior veterans in military service, despite the fact that, to his mind, he’s only spent a year or so in uniform. He also finds that the war has become increasingly absurd, as generals try to deal with enormous complexities of waging a relativistic war. Troops, for instance, are routinely shipped out with state-of-the-art weapons, only to discover, upon arrival at the battlefront, that so much “real time” has passed during their journey that their technology has become laughably out-of-date.<\/p>\n

The Forever War<\/i> is a rather simple book, refreshingly so. I’ve grown so accustomed to sci-fi novels cram-packed with throw-away ideas that it was nice to read one that set out to explore all of its ramifications of a single, clever conceit. Haldeman is clearly a man who knows a thing or two about military matters, and his depiction of battle, fanciful though it is, comes across as unnervingly accurate. He uses the chronological chaos to illustrate what the soldiers in the field unquestionably feel as they march into combat: that much of “military planning” hinges on hunches and hope. By pointing out the absurdity of trying to fight an intergalactic war, Haldeman points out the absurdity of war itself, but does so in a way that suggests that war may sometimes be necessary all the same.<\/p>\n

I don’t know if The Forever War<\/i> is one of the most “significant’ science fiction books I’ve ever read, but it certainly numbers amongst the most enjoyable.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Science Fiction Book Club recently named their “50 Most Significant SF & Fantasy Books of the Last 50 Years“. Now, I know as well as you do that these “Best Of!” lists are totally bogus, but I’ve been in the mood for lighter reading recently, and when I saw Joe Haldeman’s novel parked in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2417","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/defectiveyeti.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2417","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/defectiveyeti.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/defectiveyeti.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/defectiveyeti.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/defectiveyeti.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2417"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/defectiveyeti.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2417\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/defectiveyeti.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2417"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/defectiveyeti.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2417"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/defectiveyeti.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2417"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}