Book Review: The Forever War

Joe Haldeman

1974

Awards: Nebula, Hugo, Locus

Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ –

The Forever War is a novel about a centuries-long outer space war between our Earth forces and an alien enemy we know almost nothing about.

Haldeman, a Vietnam veteran, wrote The Forever War as a deliberate counterpoint to Robert Heinlein’s Starship Troopers, which was published fifteen years earlier. In Starship Troopers, the insect-like enemy is relentlessly vicious and homicidal, giving the soldiers a clear purpose and justification for their fight. In The Forever War, the humanoid enemy is about as competent (and incompetent) and about as aggressive (and cautious) as we are; we seem just to battle each other to a stalemate on remote outposts over and over and over again. And the reasons for the war become ever murkier as the decades roll by.

The Forever War may have originated as a response to Heinlein, but it ended up as a key work of science fiction in its own right. The book has a good plot and good characters, vivid battle scenes, and inventive futuristic technology. It is a realistic story of the monotony and anxiety of war preparation and the terror and confusion of battle told by someone who clearly went through it himself.

The novel’s main character is William Mandella, a relatively ordinary guy blessed with common sense, luck, and a master’s degree in physics. In 1997, at the age of 22, he is drafted into Earth’s interstellar army to fight the Taurans, a humanoid species from many light years away.

We on Earth first learned about the Taurans in 1996 when one of our spaceships on a routine colonial mission (near the constellation of Taurus) went missing, and data from a follow-up probe revealed that the ship had been destroyed by an alien vessel. Based only on this information, we naturally immediately launched an all-out war against them. We don’t know where their home planet is, and they don’t know where ours is, so we fight each other in relatively even-handed skirmishes around intermediate portal planets near where the first incident happened.

Earthlings and Taurans alike get to these portal planets by going through collapsars, wormhole-like features which let you travel to a specific point light years across the galaxy in a matter of days. While traveling through collapsars, soldiers experience time dilation: they age only the time it takes to get to the other side, while years and sometimes decades are passing by in the rest of the galaxy.

                                                                                 

This means that a battalion may arrive at a new post after what feels to them to be only a few months after their last assignment, but that the Taurans they meet next may be from decades in the real-time future, with correspondingly improved weapons. Soldiers never know from battle to battle what foe they will face.

This also means, of course, that any friends and relatives the soldiers leave behind on Earth will age for many years, and even decades, while the soldiers age only months. Each time the soldiers return to port, they have to cope with lost loved ones, as well as adjusting to new customs, language, money, and technology. This is, needless to say, very hard, and causes them to bond much more closely to their fellow soldiers than to people back home.

                                                                                                

Our hero, William Mandella, starts out as a private at the beginning of the war who manages, through a combination of luck and initiative, not to get killed in his first several battles. Racking up hundreds of years of seniority on Earth after each of his collapsar jumps, he gets inexorably promoted higher in the chain of command until he is a major after only a few real-time years of service.

But the more wartime experience Mandella has, the more he wonders whether there is any point whatsoever to what he is fighting for. No one seems to have idea of a general strategy; even after hundreds of years have gone by, the soldiers still fight ad hoc battle after ad hoc battle and make adjustments on the fly. Soldiers are not interested in winning a glorious, justified war, but in avoiding being killed. The training they go through takes place in conditions that bear no relationship to actual battle situations. There is little or no recognition from home of their sacrifice, aside from the fact that Earth’s economy has grown dependent on it and will collapse if the war ends. And during his entire term of service, Mandella has had to cope with the death of almost everyone he knows and loves, whether through time dilation or gruesome death in battle.

There are a few clunky aspects to the story, and others that seem to carry too obvious of a message to work. One in particular is the way Earth’s overpopulation prompts the planet at one point to create a program of enforced homosexuality and selected cloning.

But for the most part, Haldeman writes clearly and colorfully and doesn’t trip you up with vagueness or inconsistency or too-obvious messages. He tells a good story and at the same time leaves you with a deep sense of the cost—in lost lives, friendships, wealth, and mental stability—of a pointless, protracted war.