The perils of a war-based economy: a review of Joe Haldeman's The Forever War.
From Monday, 16 September through Thursday, 19 September, I read the definitive edition of Joe Haldeman's The Forever War (NY: Thomas Dunne Books, St. Martin's Griffin [an imprint of St. Martin's Press], 2009; previously published, in different formats, in 1974, 1975, and 1997); ISBN: 978-0-312-53663-3; 275 pps.
I read The Forever War as it was first published, in a bowdlerized and more optimistic form so as not to offend the conservative and easily depressed sensibilities of sci-fi fandom, roughly twenty-five years ago, before it was turned into a series. The definitive edition, with all previously excised passages restored, was first published in 1997; the edition that I read, published in 2009, has a foreword by John Scalzi, whose Old Man's War apparently bears certain passing similarities to both Robert A. Heinlein's Starship Troopers and Joe Haldeman's The Forever War (and, to a lesser extent, John Steakley's Armor: a DAW paperback original read by me in college, and mostly forgotten a few seconds after I finished it). While I remember liking The Forever War as originally published, I like the definitive edition even better.
The Forever War opens in 1997, when Earth has just begun sending colonizing ships into interstellar space via wormholes called "collapsars" (think "black holes"), which greatly reduces the travel times for people aboard ships traveling at near-light speeds; the disappearance of some colonizer ships, apparently through attack by a mysterious, wholly unknown race called "Taurans" (as one of the colonists' ships was "pursued by another vessel and destroyed...near Aldebaran, in the constellation Taurus," the extraterrestrials are dubbed "Tauran," "since 'Aldebaranian' is a little hard to handle"; p. 9), prompts the creation of the United Nations Exploratory Force, or UNEF -- "Emphasis on the 'force'" -- which in turn causes the UN General Assembly to push through the Elite Conscription Act of 1996 that drafts only young people with IQs over 150 and "of unusual health and strength," to guard the ships and, hopefully, bring the fight to the Taurans (and incidentally discover what they look like, since in the beginning "nobody had ever seen a Tauran; hadn't even found any pieces of Taurans bigger than a scorched chromosome" (p. 8; p. 4). The book's first person narrator and protagonist, William Mandella (whose last name is a near anagram of the author's last name; although explicit reference is made to hippie parents who didn't know how to spell "mandala," one should probably be forgiven for thinking of Nelson Mandela, at least at first), goes through basic training in Missouri and then on Charon (not Pluto's moon, but a hypothetical planet beyond Pluto's orbit); the training on the latter location has a grim attrition rate due to both the environment and the fact that the recruits have to learn how to function in an exo-skeleton spacesuit (which should be disappointingly mundane to fans of superhero comics -- think Iron Man -- and nearly ho-hum familiar to readers of Starship Troopers and Armor). The first face-to-face (in a matter of speaking...) encounter between humans and Taurans occurs on a nameless, jungle-like world ("The air temperature was 79 degrees Centigrade, not quite hot enough for the sea to boil, even though the air pressure was low compared to Earth's"; p. 51); while the incident -- it can't really be dignified by the descriptor of "combat" -- goes well for the humans, this is chiefly because the UNEF had the element of surprise on its side. The Taurans soon learn to face the humans on their own terms, and the body-count on both sides skyrockets.
The war is dubbed "The Forever War" thanks to the effects of time dilation: while only a few months pass to those aboard the interstellar ships traversing through the collapsars, several years -- decades; centuries -- elapse on Earth, causing the few soldiers who manage to return Earthside to experience ever greater amounts of future shock (Alvin Toffler is name-checked in the book). Even to a reader in 2013, The Forever War contains a certain amount of future shock in its beginning: an army exclusively conscripting the best physical and mental specimens; the army allowing its troops to smoke marijuana with as little fanfare as it permits the consumption of tobacco; the army enforcing heterosexual "confraternization" among its recruits and troops for purposes of morale (but on a strictly random basis: permanent couplings are forbidden); the army mandating that its recruits and soldiers respond to officers (and, in the case of recruits, to sergeants) by saying -- or shouting -- "Fuck you, Sir!" (again, in the name of morale; needless to say, a genuine "fuck you" directed at a superior is as verboten in the UNEF as it is in any armed force in any country on our present-day Earth).
While much hay has been made of the similarities between the Earthling-Tauran conflict and the Vietnam War, which Haldeman served in (at the end of the book, a parallel to the Gulf of Tonkin Incident of 1964 is revealed to have been the catalyst of the Forever War; p. 261), to me the most powerful elements of The Forever War were the future shock elements, which, at the outer extremity of the time frame covered -- all the way to 3143 A.D. -- verge into Arthur C. Clarke or Olaf Stapledon territory, where what is "human" is as alien to the survivors from the book's parallel-world 20th century Earth as the Taurans are. If I didn't buy all of the elements of the future (or, more properly speaking, futures, since Mandella returns to Earth more than once) that Haldeman posits -- the idea that the one-world government of Earth would make homosexuality compulsory via medical intervention roughly five hundred years into the future (which recalls the main plot of Anthony Burgess's 1962 dystopian novel The Wanting Seed) never entirely convinced me, and some readers may find Mandella's marginally homophobic attitudes off-putting (then again, this was not exactly uncommon among writers of the classic age of science fiction, viz. Robert A. Heinlein's Friday and The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, Alfred Bester's The Stars My Destination, or Roger Zelazny's Lord of Light). I'm even more skeptical of the final "big reveal," but I won't disclose it here, even though the statute of limitations regarding "spoiler alerts" for a Hugo, Nebula, and Locus Award-winning novel originally published in 1974, then published in a restored edition in 1997, should be regarded by all reasonable persons as being well and truly expired.
Contemporary readers may find the most powerful anti-war elements of The Forever War to be the way that the fighting of said war is effectively ghettoized -- the fact that only the alpha males and females of Earth are conscripted to fight the war means that direct experience of same is limited to a small minority of humanity, is a mirroring of the ghettoization of the U.S.'s wars of choice, from Vietnam to the present engagements in Iraq and Afghanistan, in which it is largely members of the economic underclass and cultural minorities (i.e., the pro-military U.S. South) who choose (and "choose"...) to enlist in the U.S. armed forces -- and the way that the entire economy of Earth is utterly dependent upon the continuation of the Forever War in order to function even at a subsistence level. With war being necessary to siphon off potential troublemakers (high-IQ elites with little or no fulfilling employment prospects) and to keep the one-world government's economic engines humming, there is exactly zero chance for any negotiated peace. In Haldeman's future(s), the military industrial complex becomes a Frankensteinian tail wagging the hapless doctor dog.
That said, there are doubtless many readers who will fail to grasp The Forever War's anti-war message, which is partly understandable: military SF is its own sub-genre, and while fans of same may well find The Forever War weak tea (not enough action!), what is there (powered armored suits!) is pretty nifty; it should come as no surprise that some people will prefer to focus on the interstellar combat sequences, much as some high school girls of Your Correspondent's experience thumbed to certain dog-eared passages of Judy Blume's Forever... to read, re-read, and read aloud, in lieu of reading the entire book. Given that certain scenes of anti-war movies such as Apocalypse Now and Platoon have been used as pep rally videos for U.S. troops stationed in Iraq (a fuller treatment of this phenomenon may be found in Lawrence Wechsler's article "Valkyries Over Iraq: The Trouble with War Movies," in the November 2005 issue of Harper's Magazine; unfortunately, the article is only available online to subscribers), the notion that some readers may well find the idea of blasting across the galaxy to waste a few thousand obviously non-human "scroats" to be a hell of a fine one despite the pains that Haldeman took to present some of the downsides connected with this plan shouldn't shock anyone. Dishearten, infuriate, dismay, even fill with despair, yes; shock and surprise -- sadly, no.
* Cross-posted to LibraryThing.
I read The Forever War as it was first published, in a bowdlerized and more optimistic form so as not to offend the conservative and easily depressed sensibilities of sci-fi fandom, roughly twenty-five years ago, before it was turned into a series. The definitive edition, with all previously excised passages restored, was first published in 1997; the edition that I read, published in 2009, has a foreword by John Scalzi, whose Old Man's War apparently bears certain passing similarities to both Robert A. Heinlein's Starship Troopers and Joe Haldeman's The Forever War (and, to a lesser extent, John Steakley's Armor: a DAW paperback original read by me in college, and mostly forgotten a few seconds after I finished it). While I remember liking The Forever War as originally published, I like the definitive edition even better.
The Forever War opens in 1997, when Earth has just begun sending colonizing ships into interstellar space via wormholes called "collapsars" (think "black holes"), which greatly reduces the travel times for people aboard ships traveling at near-light speeds; the disappearance of some colonizer ships, apparently through attack by a mysterious, wholly unknown race called "Taurans" (as one of the colonists' ships was "pursued by another vessel and destroyed...near Aldebaran, in the constellation Taurus," the extraterrestrials are dubbed "Tauran," "since 'Aldebaranian' is a little hard to handle"; p. 9), prompts the creation of the United Nations Exploratory Force, or UNEF -- "Emphasis on the 'force'" -- which in turn causes the UN General Assembly to push through the Elite Conscription Act of 1996 that drafts only young people with IQs over 150 and "of unusual health and strength," to guard the ships and, hopefully, bring the fight to the Taurans (and incidentally discover what they look like, since in the beginning "nobody had ever seen a Tauran; hadn't even found any pieces of Taurans bigger than a scorched chromosome" (p. 8; p. 4). The book's first person narrator and protagonist, William Mandella (whose last name is a near anagram of the author's last name; although explicit reference is made to hippie parents who didn't know how to spell "mandala," one should probably be forgiven for thinking of Nelson Mandela, at least at first), goes through basic training in Missouri and then on Charon (not Pluto's moon, but a hypothetical planet beyond Pluto's orbit); the training on the latter location has a grim attrition rate due to both the environment and the fact that the recruits have to learn how to function in an exo-skeleton spacesuit (which should be disappointingly mundane to fans of superhero comics -- think Iron Man -- and nearly ho-hum familiar to readers of Starship Troopers and Armor). The first face-to-face (in a matter of speaking...) encounter between humans and Taurans occurs on a nameless, jungle-like world ("The air temperature was 79 degrees Centigrade, not quite hot enough for the sea to boil, even though the air pressure was low compared to Earth's"; p. 51); while the incident -- it can't really be dignified by the descriptor of "combat" -- goes well for the humans, this is chiefly because the UNEF had the element of surprise on its side. The Taurans soon learn to face the humans on their own terms, and the body-count on both sides skyrockets.
The war is dubbed "The Forever War" thanks to the effects of time dilation: while only a few months pass to those aboard the interstellar ships traversing through the collapsars, several years -- decades; centuries -- elapse on Earth, causing the few soldiers who manage to return Earthside to experience ever greater amounts of future shock (Alvin Toffler is name-checked in the book). Even to a reader in 2013, The Forever War contains a certain amount of future shock in its beginning: an army exclusively conscripting the best physical and mental specimens; the army allowing its troops to smoke marijuana with as little fanfare as it permits the consumption of tobacco; the army enforcing heterosexual "confraternization" among its recruits and troops for purposes of morale (but on a strictly random basis: permanent couplings are forbidden); the army mandating that its recruits and soldiers respond to officers (and, in the case of recruits, to sergeants) by saying -- or shouting -- "Fuck you, Sir!" (again, in the name of morale; needless to say, a genuine "fuck you" directed at a superior is as verboten in the UNEF as it is in any armed force in any country on our present-day Earth).
While much hay has been made of the similarities between the Earthling-Tauran conflict and the Vietnam War, which Haldeman served in (at the end of the book, a parallel to the Gulf of Tonkin Incident of 1964 is revealed to have been the catalyst of the Forever War; p. 261), to me the most powerful elements of The Forever War were the future shock elements, which, at the outer extremity of the time frame covered -- all the way to 3143 A.D. -- verge into Arthur C. Clarke or Olaf Stapledon territory, where what is "human" is as alien to the survivors from the book's parallel-world 20th century Earth as the Taurans are. If I didn't buy all of the elements of the future (or, more properly speaking, futures, since Mandella returns to Earth more than once) that Haldeman posits -- the idea that the one-world government of Earth would make homosexuality compulsory via medical intervention roughly five hundred years into the future (which recalls the main plot of Anthony Burgess's 1962 dystopian novel The Wanting Seed) never entirely convinced me, and some readers may find Mandella's marginally homophobic attitudes off-putting (then again, this was not exactly uncommon among writers of the classic age of science fiction, viz. Robert A. Heinlein's Friday and The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, Alfred Bester's The Stars My Destination, or Roger Zelazny's Lord of Light). I'm even more skeptical of the final "big reveal," but I won't disclose it here, even though the statute of limitations regarding "spoiler alerts" for a Hugo, Nebula, and Locus Award-winning novel originally published in 1974, then published in a restored edition in 1997, should be regarded by all reasonable persons as being well and truly expired.
Contemporary readers may find the most powerful anti-war elements of The Forever War to be the way that the fighting of said war is effectively ghettoized -- the fact that only the alpha males and females of Earth are conscripted to fight the war means that direct experience of same is limited to a small minority of humanity, is a mirroring of the ghettoization of the U.S.'s wars of choice, from Vietnam to the present engagements in Iraq and Afghanistan, in which it is largely members of the economic underclass and cultural minorities (i.e., the pro-military U.S. South) who choose (and "choose"...) to enlist in the U.S. armed forces -- and the way that the entire economy of Earth is utterly dependent upon the continuation of the Forever War in order to function even at a subsistence level. With war being necessary to siphon off potential troublemakers (high-IQ elites with little or no fulfilling employment prospects) and to keep the one-world government's economic engines humming, there is exactly zero chance for any negotiated peace. In Haldeman's future(s), the military industrial complex becomes a Frankensteinian tail wagging the hapless doctor dog.
That said, there are doubtless many readers who will fail to grasp The Forever War's anti-war message, which is partly understandable: military SF is its own sub-genre, and while fans of same may well find The Forever War weak tea (not enough action!), what is there (powered armored suits!) is pretty nifty; it should come as no surprise that some people will prefer to focus on the interstellar combat sequences, much as some high school girls of Your Correspondent's experience thumbed to certain dog-eared passages of Judy Blume's Forever... to read, re-read, and read aloud, in lieu of reading the entire book. Given that certain scenes of anti-war movies such as Apocalypse Now and Platoon have been used as pep rally videos for U.S. troops stationed in Iraq (a fuller treatment of this phenomenon may be found in Lawrence Wechsler's article "Valkyries Over Iraq: The Trouble with War Movies," in the November 2005 issue of Harper's Magazine; unfortunately, the article is only available online to subscribers), the notion that some readers may well find the idea of blasting across the galaxy to waste a few thousand obviously non-human "scroats" to be a hell of a fine one despite the pains that Haldeman took to present some of the downsides connected with this plan shouldn't shock anyone. Dishearten, infuriate, dismay, even fill with despair, yes; shock and surprise -- sadly, no.
* Cross-posted to LibraryThing.