The Forever War by Joe Haldeman — part two

One thing about this book that really stood out to me was how character driven it was. Correct me if I’m wrong, but Science Fiction thirty years ago was much less character driven than it is today. The lens of the main character was very thick in this story, and a lot of the time it reflected back on Mandella himself and his own thoughts and impressions of the things that happened to him. It was much less a story about space battles and society than on the immediate human impact of war. And unlike a lot of space adventure, it didn’t glorify it AT ALL. Neither did it censor or tone down the horror of it. You got to see the horror of it all–and sometimes the most horrifying thing was that Mandella could be so desensitized to the carnage and immorality.

But ultimately, it was Haldeman’s horrifying view of the future that made the ending so good. With each successive space battle, Mandella goes forward several years, even centuries. And each time when he comes back he finds that humanity has become more and more unrecognizeable. I won’t get into details for fear of spoiling the story, but lets just say that some of the basic things we take for granted, like the family, get completely abolished through eugenics and advanced technology. Above all, the war itself dominates everything in human society–economics, government, society, arts, culture–and earth falls into a hellish siege mentality.

However, as a reader, this bleak picture of the future doesn’t come to you in momentary jolts and shocks–it comes at you slowly and consistently throughout the whole story, to the point where sometimes you don’t even realize how tense the book is making you feel. By the time you get past the last battle, the anxiety is at its greatest–and I don’t just mean the anxiety and tension that comes from well written action, I mean the anxiety that comes from seeing the world as we know it become so polluted and transformed. And then, the ending comes, and it just feels so RIGHT. With just a minor event, something completely believable and consistent (even expected) within Haldeman’s universe, the picture suddenly doesn’t look as bleak as before, and you realize that even though Mandella can’t go back to the world as we know it, he CAN go forward and find a meaningful way to live his life–that the future isn’t all bad. The huge contrast between the ending and the rest of the story is really what makes the ending so good. Just when you think that there is no hope for the future, and no hope for Mandella, things change. And it feels so RIGHT and GOOD.

So, even though this book had a lot of immorality that would definitely turn off a lot of my friends and acquaintances here at BYU, and even though the novel is really dark and depressing at times, I would still recommend it. As a piece of post-Vietnam literature speaking to us today, it really has something to say worth hearing. Besides that, the story is just good. The space battles are fascinating and well written, the characters are human and worth caring about, the story is exciting and very well paced, and the stakes are high in an engaging conflict with an alien enemy that is genuinely frightening. This is definitely a very good piece of Science Fiction, and I’m glad that I finished it!

By Joe Vasicek

Joe Vasicek is the author of more than twenty science fiction books, including the Star Wanderers and Sons of the Starfarers series. As a young man, he studied Arabic and traveled across the Middle East and the Caucasus. He claims Utah as his home.

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