I
learned the other day that Joe Haldeman’s The
Forever War was now available as an ebook. Well, I had a paperback copy
that was signed by Joe back in the 1970s so I wasn’t inclined to buy it until I
noticed that he had updated it, or more precisely, had put back in some of the
material that had been edited out when the book was first published. Since I
liked the story that was enough of an incentive for me.
In
Joe’s new introduction, he told us that he had set the beginning of the story
in the mid-1990s because he thought that would be about the time the last of
the Vietnam Veterans would be leaving the military. Joe, like me, is a Vietnam
Veteran, and I suppose it was something about the mindset that he wanted to
incorporate into the story. Interestingly, he could have set the beginning
around 2005 or later. I retired from a variety of military assignments and
organizations in 2009 and after a fourteen month deployment to Iraq. The last
member of the Iowa National Guard to have served in Vietnam retired in 2011
(and I suspect the Iowa National Guard is glad to be rid of all of us).
I
first read the book in the mid-1970s, with the events of the 1990s still twenty
years in the future. At one point in the story, after the return of the main
character, William Mandella to Earth after his first campaign and the vagaries
of time dilation, he talked of events in 2007. It was strange reading these
things as if they were past history, and knowing that Joe’s predictions about
the future had not to come to pass. This is not meant as a criticism, merely a
comment on a first reading of the book long before we reached the 1990s and the
twenty-first century and looking at them now because they are part of the past.
Of
course, once Mandella and his companion, Marygay Potter reenlist in the Army
because it is all they know, and because Mandella’s physics education was as
relevant as that of Isaac Newton’s would have been in the twentieth century,
they are off on another time travel adventure… time dilation again.
Since
the copyright on the stories that make up The
Forever War were published beginning in 1972 (it was a serial that was
eventually put together into a novel) there are probably few surprises for the
reader of today. Mandella, because he survives the various battles he is in,
climbs up the military ladder until he is leading his own strike force which is
what we’d have called a company. There is an interesting disconnect here
because it is clear that Mandella doesn’t care for the military, but because of
his experience and his training (some of it forced into his unconscious mind as
he slumbers in hibernation for three weeks) he is a good commander. He has
found an occupation that he is good at, that his training and experience help
him be good at, and takes him away from the civilian world.
Anyway,
The Forever War is a good book that
is still in print (though I wonder if an ebook is actually “in print”) and for
those who haven’t read it, it gives a nice slice of attitudes in the early
1970s. There are a couple of very minor things that seemed clever then but not
so much now, but those are a matter of personal taste and probably a sign of my
age rather than Joe’s creation. Even those who are not into military orientated
science fiction, this should be a fun read because the point is not the
evolution of the military, but the characters who are thrust into what turn out
to be unreasonable circumstances. The characters make it worth the time and all
that other stuff is just the gravy.
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