I’m not going to lie, I really didn’t like this book when I first started it. In fact, after I got about 100 pages into it, I got disgusted and stopped reading it. But there were some things that just kept coming back into my mind, like the fascinating relativistic space battles and the basic premise: leaving the earth of the present for the earth of the future, only to find that the future isn’t all it’s cracked up to be and you can’t go home. After six months, these things bothered me so much that I decided to pick it up again and finish it, and I am VERY glad that I did!
The story is about humanity’s first contact with an alien race, and how, when this encounter turns hostile, humanity is thrown into a total war that lasts over a thousand years. William Mandella, the protagonist, is one of the first draftees of the war, and starts his training at Pluto, where poorly developed technology and live weapons training leads to several gruesome incidents in his company. As grunts in the space fleet, they work and train in hellish conditions by day, and have sex with each other all night (the fleet is coed). They head out to their first battle, which is a success but incredibly horrific as wars always are, and when their ship is attacked in transit back to earth they are barely able to limp back. When they get back, they find themselves in the year 2007, since fighting and traveling at relativistic speeds has thrown them deep into the future (Mandella joined in 1977). Mandella and his comrades are released, but find themselves in a world of global food shortages, rampant crime, ineffective government, near-universal homosexuality, almost no economic opportunity–basically, a world screwed over. Mandella decides to re-enlist–and thus enters into a strange paradigm where each battle throws him further into the future, further down the twisted path of humanity, and into worse and worse fighting, until finally, Mandella reaches the conclusion of the war at the end of a thousand years. In the process, he develops feelings for Marygay–one of his comrades from the first battle–but the passage of time pulls her as far away from him as the 1977 world that he once knew.
The things that disgusted me the first time I tried to read the book mostly had to do with the sexual promiscuity and the ridiculously inaccurate predictions of the world in 2007. As for the promiscuity, it’s everywhere, especially in the first few chapters when Mandella is still a measly private. Haldeman doesn’t get awfully explicit in the scenes or turn them into hard pornography, but just the fact that there’s so much sex in the first few chapters really turned me off.
Later, when I picked it up again, I realized that it’s not so bad since the sex isn’t there for entertainment at all, it’s there to tell a story–and in this world, in this horrific war, it’s what the soldiers do. Sex as entertainment is something that I cannot stomach, but if its there for a legitimate reason, I can handle it. Once I could see that the sex wasn’t there for its own sake, but was part of the whole picture, it made it easier to skim over the sex scenes without letting them get in the way of appreciating the meaning of the story itself.
But really, it was the inaccurate prediction of the world in 2007 that was the final straw for me six months ago. I read it and laughed, thinking “THAT’S how he thought we’d be living in 2007? Holy cow, this stuff would NEVER happen! The UN doesn’t have the authority to enforce a world food ration,” etc etc. I basically said to myself “what’s the point of reading a Science Fiction book when it fails horribly to predict the future?”
But it’s not the purpose of Science Fiction to predict the future. Not at all. Science Fiction is literature, and like any literature, it is the culture speaking to itself (at least according to Orson Scott Card, who spoke at BYU earlier this year). And, as a piece of post-Vietnam era literature, where the future is an unending horror show compared with 1977, this book really had a strong post-Vietnam way of seeing things–and something to say about how that culture viewed the world and ultimately found meaning in it. Once I saw this, it was a lot easier for me to appreciate the book. No, the 2007 of The Forever War is completely unlike the 2007 of today. But it’s not important that fact and Haldeman clash here. What’s important is to see how the post-Vietnam culture viewed war and coming home from it–and, as Science Fiction, exploring the idea until coming to something meaningful to us today.
And boy, did this story ever have meaning! When I finished it, it felt so tremendously good! I lay down on my bed staring at the ceiling for a good five minutes doing nothing but absorbing that ending into myself, it had such an impact! And after that, for most of the day I was all absent minded thinking about it. It really had a powerful impact on me.
And…I could write more, but this post is getting long, so I’ll finish this review later.
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