"Tonight we're going to show you eight silent ways to kill a man."
This is the opening line to Joe Haldeman's Sci-Fi novel The
Forever War, and if you had picked up this book in a bookstore, read that first
line, and it didn't entice you to read further, I'd be willing to wager that no
book on this planet would interest you; not to mention you most likely have the
attention span of a ferret and the intelligence of one. Okay, okay, I'm kidding
... but only slightly.
The Forever War is a book that won a triple crown; it won
the Hugo, Nebula, and Locus award for best Science Fiction Novel in 1975 and 1976. So this book is clearly no
slouch when it comes to a trophy collection and garnering some respect.
The
Forever War is about mankind engaging in an interstellar
war with aliens. While this might at first sound like a trite
concept, Haldeman turns the story on its head by applying Einstein's
Theory of
Relativity. In the Forever War, mankind has unlocked the ability to
travel
near the speed of light by using black holes (called “collapsers” in the
book)
in a wormhole-like phenomena. So, while our protagonist might spend
two years aboard a space ship traveling to a remote corner of the
universe to take down aliens, he is not two years older when he reaches his destination; in fact, he's
barely aged at all,
but everything outside of the spaceship, from his perspective, has aged
rapidly. You see, the war begins in the year 2007 and the protagonist, Joe Mandella, is
drafted
in his early twenties. But because time has progressed slowly for
Mandella
traveling near the speed of light, Mandella is still in his early to mid
twenties when he is fighting the war in the 2100s-2400s. Hence the title
of
the novel, because due to relativity mankind has been fighting a war for
so
long that in makes the 100 years war look like nothing. Other
implications of
this idea include possible mismatches in technology between the humans
and the
aliens. For instance, Mandella and his crew might take off from Earth in
the
year 2100 and thus have a ship that has the year 2100's technology. But
the
trouble is that they might encounter an alien ship that is equipped with
the
2200's technology, and thus be royally boned. This could also happen
vice
versa.
There are several other cool, speculative ideas featured in
the novel. For example, when Mandella earns his leave from the military he returns
back to Earth in the year 2070 only to find that the world is a very different
place from when he left it. Haldeman takes on a Thomas Malthian view of
the future where Earth is massively overpopulated and has exceeded its food supply, which has lead to several famines and for calories become the new form of currency. This has also led to political
unrest, high unemployment, and rapid, uncontrollable amounts of crime. Those
who can afford it must have bodyguards with them at all times lest they get
mugged and/or murdered. Those without bodyguards are very much in danger,
unless you happen to be like Joe Mandella and have quality combat training, but
even then your experience with gang members can be harrowing. The world has
become a place of deep despair, and Haldeman truly constructs a horrifying
place to live. Because the world has grown more hellish than war, Mandella is
forced to reenlist in the military.
Further into the future, Mandella discovers that one of the ways
mankind attempts to handle Earth's overpopulation is by making homosexuality the
social norm. Even farther into the future, governments genetically construct
their citizen's Brave New World style to grow up to be homosexuals. There's
even an instance of the novel where Mandella finds himself to be the only heterosexual
amongst a platoon of both homosexual men and women, leaving Mandella to be the
odd man out and the one to be considered "abnormal, unnatural, weird,
unusual" or what have you.
Oh and the Forever War is something of a love story, though
it doesn’t start that way. Haldeman incorporates a pervasive “free love” policy
amongst the men and women of the military. It practically seems like everyone
has a different partner for each day of the week. While Mandella partakes in
these activities for a while, he eventually meets someone very special, and
enters into a monogamous relationship with her. I find the idea that in a
society where it is the social norm to have polygamous relationships, but two
people only want each other anyway, to be simultaneously interesting and enduring.
This is not a pro war novel. Joe Haldeman is a Vietnam
veteran and it's abundantly clear that in many ways the Forever War is a
metaphor for the Vietnam War. Haldeman
has some harsh criticism for the Vietnam War, the military, and the U.S.
government. Mandella undergoes periods of self reflection through the novel,
particularly when he kills an alien for the first time and ponders whether the
alien's life and circumstances was really so different from his own. One
imagines that Haldeman had similar thoughts as Mandella while in Vietnam.
“Once they had talked, the first question was ‘Why did you start this
thing?’ And the answer was, ‘Me?”
Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars
-Byron
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