Book Review: Forever Peace

Joe Haldeman
1997

Awards: Nebula, Hugo, Campbell

Rating: ★ ★ ★ - -

SPOILER ALERT

In the preface to Forever Peace, Joe Haldeman explains that it is not a sequel to his earlier novel, The Forever War. But the two books are related to each other, in that they both deal with similar issues of war, and peace, and human beings’ apparently inherent and inescapable violence towards other human beings. 

I didn’t enjoy Forever Peace as much as I did The Forever War. The emotions are not quite as raw and the plot is a bit more goofily over-idealistic. It is also less of a complete whole; the first and second halves of the book are two almost completely separate stories stuck together with the most slender of links.

The first half of Forever Peace—the better half—tells the story of a war between richer and poorer nations, in which the richer nations are able to do most of their fighting by remote control. The U.S. and its allies are at war against the Ngumi, an alliance of various Asian, African, and South American countries. The Ngumi, who generally come from poorer nations, use human beings to do their fighting. For the U.S., the war is primarily fought remotely by “soldierboys,” which are giant heavily-armored humanoid semi-robotic machines.

Each soldierboy is controlled by a “mechanic,” an individual human soldier who, from a chair in a U.S. military base, is “jacked in” to his or her soldierboy’s command matrix through a neural plug at the base of his or her skull. The sensory connection is powerful enough that the mechanics feel what happens to their soldierboys as if they were inside them physically.

The mechanics are used in platoons of ten for rotations of ten days. While platoon members are all jacked together they can see, feel, and think what the others are seeing, feeling, and thinking. This makes for extremely rapid and effective communication but it also means there is basically no privacy, and it also means a lot of deep trauma when one of their soldierboys is wounded or killed in the line of duty.

The main character, Julian Chase, is a sergeant leading one of these mechanic platoons in a remote war in the jungles of Costa Rica. He has been trained and conditioned both physically and mentally to be able to do his job, but the carnage and destruction still get to him; he wages a continual battle with depression and suicidal thoughts. Eventually this reaches a crisis point and Julian has a breakdown. This is where the first story stops and the second (weaker) story takes over.

In addition to being a soldierboy mechanic, Julian is also a physics post-doc at a university in Houston. He’s dating one of his co-professors, Amelia Harding, who is working on a project to create the universe’s largest particle accelerator around the planet Jupiter.

After Julian has his breakdown, he is put on leave from the military and joins Amelia in her work. They do a bunch of calculations and discover, to their chagrin, that when the Jupiter Project is finally finished and turned on, the accelerator will replicate the conditions of the Big Bang and will thereby cause the destruction of the entire universe, starting with our solar system.

Simultaneously, some of their researcher friends find out that if you leave soldierboy mechanics jacked in to each other for two weeks or longer, they become completely empathic and can no longer bring themselves to harm any other person.

The rest of the book becomes a race against time in which Julian, Amelia, and a small group of their friends fight to get the Jupiter Project stopped. Faced with powerful sinister and lethal interests who either don’t believe them or want the project to continue anyway, their plan is to install jacks in everyone on earth’s head and turn them all into involuntary pacifists, starting with the army, before the accelerator can go live.

I always like the clarity of Haldeman’s writing and thinking. I also appreciate the questions Forever Peace raises about why we fight our wars in the first place, and the fairness of a drastically unbalanced battle between the world’s haves and the have-nots. His drawing on his own experiences as a soldier in Vietnam give a hefty weight to his clear desire for peace.

The first half of the book explores these issues with a lot of potential, but the second half seems to lose its way. We exit the jungle battlefield, which is the most interesting part of the book, and enter a world of academic theory and political sniping. The universal jacking plan seems contrived and tenuous, and everyone seems a little too eager to jump right in and implement it. And I’m also not a hundred percent sure I actually would want a world in which everyone on earth was forcibly made into a pacifist.