Forever Peace
by Joe Haldeman
Summary
In 2043 the United States fights its wars with soldierboys: armoured remote units controlled by soldiers jacked in from a bunker near the front, ten days on and twenty off. The mechanics are killed in Central America, the operators go home for dinner.
Julian Class is a physicist and a mechanic, drafted into a platoon that shares a direct neural link during operations, which means each of them experiences everything the others feel, including the killing. Nobody who has been jacked can lie to the others afterwards, and nobody comes back unchanged.
Meanwhile the physics Julian works on in his civilian life points at something worse. A particle accelerator being built in orbit will, if switched on, very probably start a new Big Bang and end the universe, and the people building it are content with that, because a significant faction wants the end to come.
Then Julian's colleague discovers that a long enough period of jacking permanently removes a person's capacity to kill another human. The obvious question, whether to impose that on everyone by force, is the actual subject of the book, and Haldeman does not pretend it has a comfortable answer.
Haldeman is very good on the domestic half. Julian's relationship with Amelia, a fellow academic, is conducted between rotations, and the ordinariness of the Texas campus he comes home to between ten day rotations at the war is the book's most disturbing effect.
Around three hundred and fifty pages, plain and quick, alternating between a first person voice for Julian and third person for everyone else, which becomes meaningful once you understand what jacking does to the boundary between them.
It is not a sequel to The Forever War, shares no characters and no universe, and readers arriving expecting one are routinely disappointed. Best for readers who want military science fiction that argues against itself, and who will sit with a genuinely uncomfortable proposal about how to end war for good.
Historical Context & Significance
Forever Peace won the 1998 Hugo Award for Best Novel, the Nebula Award and the John W. Campbell Memorial Award, a triple crown no novel had taken since Frederik Pohl's Gateway twenty two years earlier.
The two books share a title and a preoccupation and nothing else. Haldeman has been explicit that this is not a sequel, and the marketing suggestion that it was has annoyed readers ever since.
He was drafted into Vietnam, wounded badly enough to receive a Purple Heart, and spent his career writing about what combat does to the people sent to do it. He taught writing at MIT for more than thirty years and was named a Grand Master by the Science Fiction Writers of America in 2010. The novel's remote operated units anticipated the armed drone warfare that followed within a few years.