On The Forever War
Inspired by the "reader reports" my sci-fi professor has us turn in, I thought I'd do something similar, for my own benefit (and yours?), on the books I don't read for class. Probably not all of them. These aren't "reviews" in the normal sense, which is why I'm not doing this on my goodreads account. They're observations on important elements of the book in question. As the subject line suggest, this first one is on Joe Haldeman's The Forever War. If you don't want some spoilers, you probably shouldn't read on.
The first thing that struck me was how cliched a lot of the stuff was -- but, like Spielberg's directing techniques, I don't think that's Haldeman's fault. All the elements have appeared so often as to gentrify them after the book came out, due to its skill and popularity. There were some elements that Haldeman obviously picked up elsewhere, probably from Starship Troopers and The Demolished Man (or Bester in general), but not enough of them to make the book mindlessly derivative.
The social alteration is one of the primary themes of the book -- Wilson, through relativistic space travel, lives to see our society shift through thousands of years, and the changes amaze and bewilder. Most of them are logically plotted and carried out, making much of the behind-the-scenes of this book a dystopia novel. That is, population explosions would eventually lead to eugenics, so on, so forth. Fairly typical. The prediction of mass homosexuality, enforced by law, is a bit random, but it works on the rest of the themes of the book -- mainly the estrangement and separation that war of any kind leads to. That's the driving force behind the book, of course; the near-light-speed travel acts as a metaphor for the mental distance that any war puts between the soldier and the society from which he or she originated.
The Forever War is one of those books that feels like SF without bothering its head about the origins, but with no exceptions I can think of this book could be a fantasy. The SF travel leading to differences in time could just as easily be magic portals, the aliens are already completely fantastic creatures, and that's it. The reason why it's an SF novel is that fantasy removes us from our frame of reference entirely and shows us things true about every single person -- the "psychological realism" of the Gothic tradition as defined by Walpole -- but the novel wants to illustrate something quite specific that not everyone has in them, and so it must cleave closer to zero world than the same story, enabled in a fantasy, would be able to.
The book isn't about all of us, only what the views all of us hold do to a few of us. And like 2001: A Space Odyssey it offers a new step for humankind that eliminates the problem: Man, the hive-mind clone construct. It's vaguely horrifying, viewed through the eyes of Wilson and Charlie, and appropriately so -- it's a common trope in SF that the next step in humankind might be alien to us as we are now, and that, in a corollary statement, we are simply a waypoint on the way of evolution, rather than the end of the line. The Star-Child is equally frightening and horrifying in Kubrick's movie, breaking the fourth wall, something no one in the film's depiction of our entire history was able to do beforehand. Man is slightly less horrible, as it still looks like us, but only barely so. The sense of alienation and displacement are heightened even more by Man, though, as while the Star-Child (in Clarke's book sequel, at least) only wonders what it should do with Earth, Man is already the dominant social force, and remnants of humanity remain only as a kindly-regarded eugenics experiment and "Plan B."
The first thing that struck me was how cliched a lot of the stuff was -- but, like Spielberg's directing techniques, I don't think that's Haldeman's fault. All the elements have appeared so often as to gentrify them after the book came out, due to its skill and popularity. There were some elements that Haldeman obviously picked up elsewhere, probably from Starship Troopers and The Demolished Man (or Bester in general), but not enough of them to make the book mindlessly derivative.
The social alteration is one of the primary themes of the book -- Wilson, through relativistic space travel, lives to see our society shift through thousands of years, and the changes amaze and bewilder. Most of them are logically plotted and carried out, making much of the behind-the-scenes of this book a dystopia novel. That is, population explosions would eventually lead to eugenics, so on, so forth. Fairly typical. The prediction of mass homosexuality, enforced by law, is a bit random, but it works on the rest of the themes of the book -- mainly the estrangement and separation that war of any kind leads to. That's the driving force behind the book, of course; the near-light-speed travel acts as a metaphor for the mental distance that any war puts between the soldier and the society from which he or she originated.
The Forever War is one of those books that feels like SF without bothering its head about the origins, but with no exceptions I can think of this book could be a fantasy. The SF travel leading to differences in time could just as easily be magic portals, the aliens are already completely fantastic creatures, and that's it. The reason why it's an SF novel is that fantasy removes us from our frame of reference entirely and shows us things true about every single person -- the "psychological realism" of the Gothic tradition as defined by Walpole -- but the novel wants to illustrate something quite specific that not everyone has in them, and so it must cleave closer to zero world than the same story, enabled in a fantasy, would be able to.
The book isn't about all of us, only what the views all of us hold do to a few of us. And like 2001: A Space Odyssey it offers a new step for humankind that eliminates the problem: Man, the hive-mind clone construct. It's vaguely horrifying, viewed through the eyes of Wilson and Charlie, and appropriately so -- it's a common trope in SF that the next step in humankind might be alien to us as we are now, and that, in a corollary statement, we are simply a waypoint on the way of evolution, rather than the end of the line. The Star-Child is equally frightening and horrifying in Kubrick's movie, breaking the fourth wall, something no one in the film's depiction of our entire history was able to do beforehand. Man is slightly less horrible, as it still looks like us, but only barely so. The sense of alienation and displacement are heightened even more by Man, though, as while the Star-Child (in Clarke's book sequel, at least) only wonders what it should do with Earth, Man is already the dominant social force, and remnants of humanity remain only as a kindly-regarded eugenics experiment and "Plan B."