The Forever War
by Joe Haldeman
Summary
William Mandella is conscripted under an elite draft that takes the most educated young people on Earth and sends them to fight the Taurans, an enemy nobody has seen, in a war that began with an ambiguous incident nobody can explain.
The physics does the work. Travel between the collapsar jumps happens at relativistic speed, so a soldier ages months while decades or centuries pass at home. Mandella survives his first campaign and returns to an Earth of food riots and casual violence that he no longer recognises. He reenlists because there is nowhere else, and each subsequent tour costs him more time. Eventually humanity is homosexual by policy to control population, then a single cloned group mind, and he is a museum piece commanding troops who regard him as a sexual deviant and a relic.
The combat is brutal, technical and deliberately unglamorous, and the enemy is unknowable until the very end, when the explanation of the war arrives and is worse than no explanation at all.
Haldeman was drafted, served in Vietnam and was badly wounded, and the book is that experience transposed with almost no disguise: the futility, the incomprehensible objectives, and above all coming home to a country that had moved on without you.
Marygay Potter is the reason it lands. She and Mandella are together from basic training onward, and the whole tragedy of relativistic war is compressed into the problem of two people trying to stay in the same century, which produces one of the most quietly moving endings in the genre.
Around two hundred and fifty pages, fast, cold and far more readable than most novels of its vintage, with an entertainingly wrong 1997 for its near future.
Readers should know that the treatment of enforced homosexuality reads as a period artefact now, and that Haldeman has said he intended it as one more way for Mandella to be made a stranger rather than as a judgement.
Best for readers who want the definitive argument against military science fiction, written by a man who was drafted and badly wounded in Vietnam.
Historical Context & Significance
The Forever War won the 1976 Hugo Award for Best Novel, the 1975 Nebula Award and the Locus Award, and it was the first title chosen for Gollancz's SF Masterworks series when it launched in 1999.
Joe Haldeman was drafted into Vietnam as a combat engineer, was severely wounded and received a Purple Heart, and wrote the novel shortly after returning. Several publishers rejected it before St Martin's took it.
It is usually read as a direct answer to Robert Heinlein's Starship Troopers, which treats military service as the foundation of citizenship. Haldeman has said he did not write it as a rebuttal, and that Heinlein, whom he admired, told him he had liked it.
A section originally cut by the publisher, the middle novella You Can Never Go Back, was restored in the definitive edition.