SF Masterworks #1: The Forever War, by Joe Haldeman
Spoiler Warning: This review gives away the plot of the book. Completely.
'Tonight we're going to show you eight silent ways to kill a man.' The guy who said that was a sergeant who didn't look five years older than me. So if he'd ever killed a man in combat, silently or otherwise, he'd done it as an infant.
— The Forever War, Opening lines of Chapter 1.
The Forever War was one of the first science fiction books I ever bought. It was the 1976 Orbit paperback edition and I acquired it from a bookshop in York when I was 13. I'd wandered into York in the hopeful company of some girls I'd met on a weekend course. Our interests very quickly diverged (story of my life) and I found myself at a bookstore in the Shambles, facing a rack of new SF paperbacks.
I calculated I had enough money - if I missed lunch - for three books. Alongside The Forever War, I selected Philip K. Dick's Clans of the Alphane Moon and Ursula Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness.
I had never heard of Joe Haldeman or Ursula Le Guin or Philip K Dick. I had, however, from picking up books at the library, heard of the Nebula and Hugo awards. And my favourite SF book at the time, Dune, had won both. So the loud proclamations on the covers of both The Forever War (which had at that point won only the Nebula) and The Left Hand of Darkness (which had already won both) were selling points enough for me. For the Dick novel, well I just liked Peter Jones' cover illustration (and actually, in Le Guin's case, the cover was excellent as well).
So I got lucky. The Forever War and The Left Hand of Darkness came very quickly to be regarded as masterpieces. Clans, though I have a considerable affection for it (and although it took me quite a while before I got round to reading it, after having read ten or more of PKD's other novels) is regarded as a minor contribution to Dick's oeuvre. In an appendix to Lawrence Sutin's excellent Divine Invasions - A Life of Philip K. Dick, Sutin rates each of Dick's novels out of 10. He gives Clans a 7: "... an uneven novel, but there's nothing else like it."
For me, at the time, it was The Forever War that made the deepest impact, in particular the opening section, with its depiction of the deadly training regimes of the soon-to-be Space Marines. Even at the time, the Vietnam analog was obvious to me. I was 12 years old when Saigon fell; though the UK had taken no part in the Vietnam war, we had traced the progress towards the collapse of the American position in the daily BBC radio bulletins played by the driver on our 3-mile bus ride to school. And I was old enough to draw a connection between the cynical, nihilistic, even drug addled outlook of Haldeman's poor bloody infantry with other contemporary accounts (notably in the adult-oriented comic books that were coming out at the same time, and which I was also consuming voraciously). And I also remembered the ending - as being romantic. But when I came, much later, to re-read the novel, I found I'd forgotten much of what happens between the breakneck first quarter and the final paragraph.
"Being in combat changes your life completely, usually for the worse. It's not specific things that happen in combat, it's a kind of gestalt - living with horror for day after day after day, and finally you've sort of moved away from the human condition. And you never quite get back, no matter how many years go by. I've seen this in old, old men who were in World War I. I look in their eyes and I see myself. They can never be completely kind. They can never be completely humane."
— Joe Haldeman, interviewed in Locus magazine, 1997; quoted in Brian Stableford's Against the New Gods
Having graduated with a degree in astronomy and physics from the University of Maryland, Haldeman was drafted by the US army and sent out to Vietnam in February 1968 to serve as a combat engineer. That September, he and three other engineers were detailed to guard a captured ammunition pile; the pile was booby trapped and exploded, killing the other men and severely wounding Haldeman. He was shipped home, and sought a career as a writer.
In 1972 he published The War Year, a non-SF novel based on the letters he had written to his wife during his time in Vietnam. He was encouraged in this by Ben Bova, whom he had met at a writing workshop. When Bova took over Analog, he also purchased "Hero" - the first of the stories that would become The Forever War.
Unlike The War Year (and a subsequent work, 1968), The Forever War uses science fiction to explore Haldeman's Vietnam experience. He places himself - and his own experience - at the centre of the novel. The protagonist's name, Mandella, is an almost-anagram of Haldeman; Haldeman's wife Gay, whom he had married in 1965, and to whom he hoped to return, was born Mary Gay Potter. He parallels his literal sense of "alienation", fighting under strange stars (in a later essay he noted that, as a stargazer since childhood, the first thing that struck him as he came into land for the first time in Vietnam were the different constellations of the Southern Hemisphere) and his figurative disconnection, firstly from a war he had never supported, and secondly from a society that was in the process of sudden transformation - 1968 is an account of "the year he missed".
The Forever War was first published as a series of stories in Analog magazine, starting with "Hero" in June 1972 and followed by "We Are Very Happy Here" (November 1973), "The Best of All Possible Worlds" and "End Game" (January 1975). Analog's editor, Ben Bova, rejected a further story in the sequence, "You Can Never Go Back"; this segment was published in November 1975 in Amazing Stories. The Analog stories were edited together and published as The Forever War in 1975, to considerable acclaim; by the following year, the book had won both of Science Fiction's premier awards, the Hugo and the Nebula, the seventh novel to do so since the institution of the Nebula award in 1966.
Bova had rejected "You Can Never Go Back" on the grounds of its being "too downbeat"; the original novel (the version that won the awards) replaced this section with a more streamlined bridging sequence to get Mandella and Marygay back into the army. The novel was also updated with "more adult language and situations" (all the quotations here are Haldeman's own words, from his Author's Note to the 1997 edition). In 1991, a new edition of the novel was published, with the missing segment now included instead of the original bridging material - though Haldeman has noted this version was something of a "Frankenstein's Monster", with internal contradictions where the restored material didn't quite mesh with the surrounding 1975 text. This was further revised in 1997 to clean up those inconsistencies.
There are, therefore, four versions of the novel: firstly, the original serialised stories in Analog; secondly, the novelisation thereof, published in January 1975, with the streamlined middle section - this is the version that won the Hugo and Nebula awards; third, the reintroduction of "You Can Never Go Back", effectively replacing "We Are Very Happy Here", published in 1991; and, finally, the 1997 cleanup, which better reintegrates "You Can Never Go Back" into the finished book. It's this last version - the author's preferred version - that you'll find in current editions of the novel.
This matters. The book you buy today is not the book that won the awards. The version that swept the Hugo and Nebula was essentially censored to make it more palatable - and ironically, by restoring the bleakness, Haldeman made it a more honest reflection of the Vietnam veteran's experience, the very thing he was praised for in the first place. Readers should know they're not reading the same text that won in 1976.
When Millennium initiated their S.F. Masterworks series, in 1999, they selected The Forever War as the first volume. That version was the 1997 edition. Having acquired Millennium, Gollancz/Orion republished the same version as part of their series relaunch in 2010, with the addition of an introduction by Adam Roberts and an afterword by Peter Hamilton.
The book's significance rests on a number of considerations. It was - and remains - a skilfully constructed SF-based liberal critique of the Vietnam War, published shortly after the event, by an author who had actually participated in the war. It was an expression of the alienation felt by returning soldiers from that war, to an American society which had undergone significant transformations in their absence. In both of these respects, it was also early; even outside the SF genre, substantial and authentic works on Vietnam, by veterans or journalists who had been present in the theatre of war, were as yet rare. I can think of Tim O'Brien's If I Die in a Combat Zone (1973) and Robert Stone's Dog Soldiers (1974). Michael Herr's Dispatches wasn't published till 1977. Hollywood didn't get round to dealing with the issue until The Deer Hunter in 1978 (and The Deer Hunter wasn't even originally set in Vietnam; it was based on a screenplay about Russian Roulette in Las Vegas that was transposed to Vietnam by Cimino and his co-writer). Platoon, Jacob's Ladder and Full Metal Jacket (based on Herr's book) had to wait till the 80s.
Finally, as a successful liberal critique of "military science fiction", notably exemplified in Heinlein's Starship Troopers (the book to which The Forever War is often compared, though Haldeman has repeatedly claimed he wrote much of the novel blissfully unaware of the potential comparisons), it served both to revive this sub-genre and to turn it on its head. Henceforth, "serious" Space Opera would require a greater degree of emotional authenticity to be considered successful. Given the continuing abundance of terrible military sci-fi, this statement might be held to be controversial. But I'd argue that, before Haldeman, it was easier to write bad Space Opera and still be considered a decent SF writer. An early example: Stephen Goldin was working on novelising his 1974 short story, "But As a Soldier, For His Country". Having read The Forever War, Goldin went back, rewrote and re-layered the novel to improve the character and narrative. The result was the - unjustly forgotten - novel The Eternity Brigade, published in 1980.
The book opens in 1997, twenty years or so after the novel's original publication. Haldeman didn't see fit to change this timeline in his revised editions. From his Author's Note to the 1997 edition: "The dates in the book are now kind of funny; most people realize that we didn't get into an interstellar war in 1996. I originally set it in that year so that it was barely possible that the officers and NCOs could be veterans of Vietnam, so we decided to leave it that way, despite the obvious anachronisms. Think of it as a parallel universe."
The United Nations of Earth are a year into an interstellar war with the mysterious Taurans. Earth has conscripted an elite corps of soldiers - all in top physical condition and with IQs over 150 - to guard and win back the "portal planets" that stand at the choke points of interstellar travel. Our protagonist, William Mandella, is swept up in the draft. Much of the opening section is devoted to the recruits' military training, which takes place in extreme environments and using live weapons. It's so dangerous that several of Mandella's colleagues are killed before they see combat. These scenes stick in the memory; 40 or so years after originally reading the novel, it's this section that came most immediately to mind when I picked it up again.
Long distance space travel takes place through "collapsars", instant transportation gateways between star systems. However, travel to and from the collapsars necessarily takes place at very high speeds, close to the speed of light. As a result, time spent on campaign accumulates a relativistic time-debt back home; the first campaign lasts two years in "real time", but almost 30 years have passed on Earth when they return.
By this time Mandella has fallen in love with one of his comrades - Marygay Potter. The two return to an Earth no longer recognisable. In the 1975 award-winning version, the world is strange but functional, and they re-enlist largely out of future shock. In the restored 1997 version, Earth is nightmarish: the economy is in ruins, medical care is rationed to the point of death sentences for the elderly, and they are physically attacked by gangs. Their re-enlistment feels less like a choice and more like a desperate flight back to the only safety they know.
Through relativistic accident, Mandella survives the next four years of subjective time while centuries pass on Earth, becoming the war's longest surviving human combatant. All of his original comrades are killed. The army's new recruits are now of a uniform, merged ethnicity and exclusively homosexual. Despite being a senior officer - achieved purely by survival - he's set apart from them by his sexuality, his ethnicity and his archaic version of English. In the final battle, the enemy Taurans are revealed to have been a hive mind all along; the entire war was the result of a misunderstanding, deliberately prolonged by Earth's military-industrial complex.
A thousand years into the future, mankind is now made up exclusively of clones, connected in a hive mind like the Taurans. Mandella is sent to a reserve for the original, uncollective, heterosexual humans. There, he's reunited with Marygay, who has been cruising in space, burning objective time, to wait for him. A news item announces the birth of a "fine baby boy".
This was the happy ending I remembered reading at age 13. Haldeman, in interviews, has been at pains to emphasise it isn't happy. At the end, he and Marygay are living on a reservation, effectively in a human zoo - in the 1975 version called "Finger Station", renamed "Middle Finger" in the 1997 edition, Haldeman's final dryly humorous salute to the military-industrial complex and perhaps his original editors. They are evolutionary dead ends, allowed to exist as a courtesy, like a small enclosure for a species that is effectively extinct. The baby is a victory for the individuals, but a total defeat for their kind.
The Starship Troopers Comparison
The comparison to Heinlein's Starship Troopers is unavoidable, though Haldeman has claimed he wrote much of the novel without it in mind. The structural parallels are obvious: elite soldiers, deadly training, powered armour, interstellar war against alien bugs. But the books are ideological opposites.
Heinlein's Mobile Infantry is a meritocracy that works. Military service is the path to citizenship, to meaning, to adulthood. The bugs are genuinely alien and genuinely threatening; the war is necessary; the sacrifices are worthwhile. Heinlein served in the US Navy between the wars, was invalided out with tuberculosis, and missed combat entirely. His memories of service were fond. Starship Troopers is the book of a man who regretted not getting to fight.
Haldeman got his fight. He got his Purple Heart. The UNEF in The Forever War is not a meritocracy but a meat grinder, and one that exists - as we eventually learn - largely to perpetuate itself. The Taurans are barely present; we learn almost nothing about them until the war's end, when it transpires the whole thing was a manufactured misunderstanding. The sacrifices were not worthwhile. They were pointless.
If Starship Troopers is a recruitment poster, The Forever War is the VA hospital.
The Time Machine
My memory of the book, from that first reading at 13, was of military science fiction - dominated by the Full Metal Jacket-style training sequences that open the novel. Rereading it now, I'm struck by how much it's also a time travel story.
The relativistic effects of near-lightspeed travel mean Mandella ages years while Earth ages centuries. He returns, repeatedly, to a world increasingly unrecognisable. The society he left - heterosexual, ethnically diverse, English-speaking - gives way first to mandatory homosexuality and population control, then to a uniform "vaguely Polynesian" ethnicity, then to clone consciousness and hive mind.
Wells' Time Traveller visits the year 802,701 and finds humanity bifurcated into the ethereal Eloi and the brutal Morlocks. He's an observer, a tourist with a machine. Mandella has no machine and no choice. And the inversion is telling: he doesn't arrive as a sophisticated Victorian among degenerates. He arrives as the primitive - heterosexual, individual, violent - among the evolved. He's not the Time Traveller. He's the Morlock, lost in a world of Eloi.
By the novel's end, Mandella and Marygay are specimens in a human zoo, preserved on a planet called Middle Finger. The alienation is total.
The Problem of Sex
Haldeman's intent with the mandatory homosexuality is clear enough: it's an estrangement device, a marker of how far the future has drifted from Mandella's baseline. But authorial intent and textual implication are different things, and the text implies something more specific. The novel frames homosexuality not merely as change but as a response to overpopulation - a world that no longer needs men to reproduce. What Mandella encounters isn't just a different culture; it's one in which traditional masculinity has become redundant. The heterosexual male soldier, whose entire identity is built on a particular kind of usefulness, finds himself obsolete in every sense.
This creates an odd tension with the novel's earlier sections, which treat female combatants with casual, forward-looking egalitarianism. Marygay is Mandella's equal throughout; the military is integrated without comment. That progressivism makes the later framing of homosexuality-as-decline more jarring, not less. Haldeman wasn't being malicious - he has subsequently expressed regret - but the mechanism he chose for estrangement has aged in ways he didn't anticipate. SF estrangement devices are powerful precisely because they externalise contemporary anxieties; the risk is that they also preserve those anxieties in amber, visible to later readers in ways the author never intended.
This doesn't invalidate The Forever War. But it does date it, in ways that the physics and the powered armour do not.
Returning to York
I walked back from the Shambles to the college without lunch, three paperbacks in my bag, the girls long since dispersed to whatever had interested them more than a thirteen-year-old with a book habit. I don't remember minding. I had The Forever War, and The Left Hand of Darkness, and a Philip K. Dick novel with a good cover. I had enough.
I didn't know, then, that I was only just starting out on a far longer journey - fifty years of reading science fiction, of accumulating references and opinions and the kind of useless expertise that makes you good at pub quizzes and bad at small talk. I didn't know that the book I'd just bought would win both major awards within the year, or that I'd still be writing about it five decades later, or that I'd come to it again and find it both more and less than I remembered.
What I remembered was the training, and the romance, and the happy ending. What I'd forgotten was the loneliness - the long, relativistic loneliness of a man out of time, fighting a war that meant nothing, returning to a home that no longer existed. At thirteen, that went over my head. Now, it doesn't.
Mandella's journey was a thousand years. Mine has been fifty. Both of us ended up somewhere we didn't expect, surrounded by people we don't entirely recognise, clutching whatever we managed to hold onto.
He got Marygay. I got the books.
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