The Forever War: Book Review

I just finished reading The Forever War by Joe Haldeman. This is a military science fiction book that was written in 1974 by a Vietnam war veteran. This "Forever War" is essentially a conflict between the human race and an alien species that they know nothing about. They are essentially clueless as they plunge into what could potentially be an existential conflict, but this is the only thing that can be done.

More importantly, there is a special focus on the return to life after war, as the soldiers try to adapt to their new life after being abroad for so long. This is where some interesting scifi spin involving relativity comes into play.

So what did I think? Let's see.

No Spoilers

Core Premise

Right from the outset, it is worth commenting on the key scifi element that was added to the story. As I mentioned above, the story tries to focus on the characters having to return home from war, as much as the war itself. And Haldeman has a genuinely fascinating way of exploring this idea via the usage of relativity. From Einstein's theory, we know that time slows down the faster a given frame of reference is moving; this is called time dilation. The closer to the speed of light (the speed limit of the universe), the slower time moves. (Indeed, as time approaches zero, mass increases toward infinity. The only reason light can travel this fast is because it has no mass. But scifi always breaks down at some point, haha). In any case, Haldeman takes advantage of time dilation to demonstrate that massive amounts of time will have passed after a soldier has gone on campaign. It will be months for them, but potentially decades and more for earth itself.

It's pretty obvious how interesting this can be.

Then there is the question of execution as a story. This is the question of all scifi. And I have to say that I didn't really feel it as much as I should have. There are patches of it, I will say. In the beginning, during the first depiction of this effect, there was a fair amount of immersion. At the same time, there was not that much to compare it to. The reader does not have that much knowledge of what Mandella's (the protagonist's) life was before everything came down. The book starts with him training, we then see him return and get told that everything has changed. The characters don't really react in meaningful ways. They abstractly talk about what will change and how, but there are no real scenes where we feel it.

If I am going to read a book about a topic like this, I would imagine that it would have scenes, at least in flashback, with the character reminiscing the old life. The story can start with them in training, but have a motif of them recalling their life before. Maybe they have dreams. There should be specific aspects of their life that they fix onto. Maybe they understand that things could change, but you get to see them rationalize or downplay the impact the time change would have. And then, when they do go home, they are then forced to confront all of these specificities directly. Decades have passed. Perhaps they remember certain family members. They know they will be older. But what changes will there actually be? A character that downplays this will get slapped as a result.

What this story lacked was this specificity. Mandella sees the change, in the beginning, and in the abstract. This story reads more like a scientist exploring ideas than an emotionally attached character writer.

And the story goes on from there as the "Forever War" continues, as you can imagine. The nature of this continuation will certainly change how Mandella sees future interactions with earth, spanning yet farther and farther into the future. Indeed, it kind of does. But it doesn't really mean much, given that Mandella never literally "sees" much of anything. The portrayal of these changes is ridiculous and essentially irrelevant. The best we get is when Mandella has tension with new recruits. But that is probably the least interesting thing to see.

The character's actual interactions become so detached that this supposed key storyline isn't even a story anymore.

This might just be another case of a military scifi story failing to spice itself up because it got too lost in the weeds of badass fight scenes. That is too glib of me, I admit. The fights are not glamorized. They show the injustice and the cruelty. But, by the end, there is no emotional weight there, either. They are just happening.

Commentary on War

The next section is skewed toward negative, and at best mixed. As I stated above, Haldeman was a war veteran, and this is definitely apparent in the story. Many reviews have already talked about the self-insert aspect of the story, so I will leave that aside.

This book is critical of war, but that is obviously not enough for me to praise it. The way in which war is critiqued is also important. From the outset, the book is alright. I get the sense that some of its commentary is a critique of Starship Troopers, though that is only secondhand knowledge. I have yet to read that book. I just know it is controversial amongst left wing, especially anarchist, readers who think that it is fascist. Apparently, the men and the women fight together in equal capacity. Haldeman mirrors this, but then twists it in a way that makes it more realistic, at least to my mind.

This is a good start.

Once the initial fighting starts, there were elements showing the horrors of war. And I did enjoy this. I also began to notice cracks in the critique, however. The military was relying on drugs to make the soldiers more blood thirsty. This immediately struck me as rather contrived, given that people don't need that much incentive, especially if they are fighting against an alien entity. Literal aliens. The term "dehumanize" is anthropocentric in and of itself.

The ending of the book is imbecilic and the so-called commentary on war is vacant. I'll leave that for the spoiler section.

Predicting the Future

Apparently, this story has made accurate predictions about the future. Some are more precise than others. And this is true to a certain degree, though I don't think it is as profound as most seem to suggest.

One of them is the usage of tha, ther, thim pronouns, which are supposedly a prediction of they, them, their pronouns today. The book makes them sound odd as a kind of flourish, so I'll leave that aspect aside. The main thing is that Haldeman explicitly specifies that they are used collectively. In other words, they were used to refer to collectives of people, rather than as a reference to singular people. It is not a prediction of pronoun usage for non-binary genders.

Other predictions are rather par for the course, like overpopulation and the downstream consequences.

The one main standout was his portrayal of homosexuality. And this made me laugh. It was one of those moments where you read it, wonder if the woke left would be offended by it, and conclude that you ought to just flip a coin. It's like crossdressing. Is that offensive to dysphoric people or not? You could make a point in either way. And I read some reviews just taking for granted that it was offensive, and some brushing over it. There are never any answers.

I think part of the reason homosexuality and increasing femininity was predicted by Haldeman was because of civilizational cycles, though the rebuttal to that might be the fact that Haldeman probably doesn't have that political orientation. Perhaps he just thinks the patriarchy will decline over time.

Finally, I find the idea of this book accurately predicting anything substantive to be silly. There's the fact that it is a scifi book set in 1997. It was written in 1974 and it predicted regular space travel, collapsar jumps, etc. by the time I was born. Usually, scifi books jump ahead a few hundred years, but apparently Haldeman wanted that in the near future. Should that count as a laughably stupid failed prediction? I'm probably taking this too seriously, but the thought does arrive.

Random Comments

The one positive comment that I forgot to mention is that I like how technology was affected by time dilation. Because time slows down for the reference frame of the traveler, the ship flying to a given location could very well come into contact with an enemy that has technology hundreds of years more advanced, as they have experienced time for a much longer period than the frame of reference.

There was a point in the book where I saw them mention that Mandella returned to home in 2007, rather than 2023. I don't know what I missed, here.

The fact that space travel in the sense described here is possible in 1997, it makes me wonder why things like climate change would even be an issue for the world at all.

The concept of clones in this book, like all scifi, is nonsense. Human beings are not genetically determined. We follow predictable developmental pathways that respond to environmental stimuli. This is strongly influenced by genetics, but as many would gleefully point out, it is not determined by them. The point here is that the closest thing to a clone that could ever possibly exist is an identical twin (of the same gender). In this story, clones essentially have collective consciousness, though that is barely at all explored. Indeed, its implementation is ridiculous.

Conclusion

Overall, I did not like this book. There were good concepts, but can I really give much weight to that when they are just missed opportunities? I think I will give this book a 2/10.

Spoiler

I

It is easy to say that war is bad. Most people aren't from the age of Alexander the Great. We often imagine it, and we can play games to pretend, but most adults do not operate under that fun illusion in their real lives. Yet, I find that I hate most books that say that war is bad. They are often a pseudointellectual enterprise, and the points they make are so often contrived or obnoxious. This book is moreso the former.

Of course, the war ends up being a misunderstanding. This book is basically a precursor to another scifi book that I won't name for the sake of spoilers. It turns out that the evil alien buggers were simply different. The warring did not need to happen. Technically, the other book handled the topic better, given that the aliens in that story were actively hostile, and the twist still managed to work. But that was never the focus of this story, so this isn't really a criticism.

That fact that the war was essentially the result of human folly, specifically militarism, shows in spades the influence of the Vietnam War on this book. Yet, I can't really take this all that seriously. People love to portray the Vietnam War as just needless militarism, but the more I read about this period and global geopolitics in general, the more I begin to realize just how superficial it is.

The only reason people dislike Vietnam is because America lost. I don't think people are opposed to intervention on principle. Further, there is no real geopolitical reason why the Korean War is any different than the Vietnam one. Both were part of the larger Cold War against the Soviet Union. They were funding proxy wars and were trying to spread their version of communism around the globe in opposition to American Liberal Capitalism. People love to squeal about American Imperialism, yet the Soviet Union funded coups and subverted other countries for their own ends. And Korea and Vietnam were part of this.

Quite simply, I don't know what people think the alternative was. Should America have let North Korea take over the South? Should Kim Jung Un be lording over the whole peninsula today? And if the answer is 'no,' then should that not imply action with regards to Vietnam? What would have happened if America just let the Soviet Union colonize these two countries? There are wider implications to wars abroad. They are not popular. They seem outside American interests in any direct sense. Yet, I frankly don't buy these pig-brained critiques implying that Vietnam (and, by damning logical extension, Korea) are just mindless militarism. As is so often the case, moralists don't even understand the arguments made in favor of what they criticize.

II

I mentioned that the usage of clones in this book was ridiculous. That was rather mild. A better "R" word would be retarded. This is because it's supposed to be a solution to war. By turning the whole planet into clones that are simply produced in a controlled setting, they manage to overcome war by eliminating conflict. I already showed how this was a confused understanding of how clones work. And I get it, scifi can do this kind of thing. Yet, I can't get around the fact that this is supposed to be a solution to war.

The fact that humans still reproduce normally on other planets means that war isn't overcome even by Haldeman's own rules. And the implications of the cloning idea are not explored, they are just taken for granted. Think about it. By cloning itself, humanity has essentially destroyed itself in a fundamental way. But there isn't even a hint of a thought paid to this. Maybe Haldeman wanted to touch upon this in the later entries—trust me, I understand the book needs some focus—but that doesn't mean you don't even bat an eye at it.

And perhaps some exploration of the idea could be in the realm of this novel. If focus had been put on how society changes over the millennia of this "Forever War" that doesn't last forever, Haldeman could possibly have detailed the pathway. The story could have started out with the smaller jumps that were more personal, progressing into more abstract societal changes, until Mandella begins to realize that humanity itself is no longer what it was. And then he has to leave the planet and the whole species behind, because it is no longer human. But that is not what we got, not on an emotional level, and not even on a more abstract level, save for references to the species being gay and the like.

This was such a staggering missed opportunity.

III

This leads to the last section of the review, which is pretty straightforward. I already questioned the execution of the story, specifically with regards to the character. I swear to every God there is, the end of the book, the final revelations, are revealed through narrative summary. Mandella is literally given a book that he then reads, detailing the folly of the war, and that is it. The ending of this book is horrifically delivered.

The only thing more annoying is the starry-eyed ending, which is so telling, given the idiotic war commentary.

IV

Marygay lives. Lol.

Conclusion

Overall, I did not like this book. There were good concepts, but can I really give much weight to that when they are just missed opportunities? I think I will give this book a 2/10.