review: The Forever War

[The Holy Saint, Grand High Poobah, Master of Monkeys, Ehlers]

reference: http://www.timewastersguide.com/view.php?id=1196

[The Jade Knight]

A few comments:
1.  I do not consider Starship Troopers "the other great Sci-Fi War book", as if there were no great Sci-Fi books apart from Starship Troopers and The Forever War
2.  At this point, Population trends seem to be such that overpopulation will never be a problem - it is expected that the earth's population will cap at somewhere between 10 and 15 billion people.  (www.overpopulation.com is one good resource for information on overpopulation and demographic trends).

I'm also curious how women in the military fail to procreate and why this procedure could not have been adopted on the earth so that homosexuality would have been unnecessary…

Some brands of Sci-Fi just rub me the wrong way, I fear.

[Skar]

I'm pretty sure that Joe Haldeman would be upset if he knew we were calling him Hoe Haldeman.  We can really claim to know nothing about his social and/or work habits.

[Mad Dr Jeffe]

Did Eric write Hoe?

Arrrgghhh!!!

Interesting comments. I feel like I should address a few.

1. Like it or not, Starship Troopers is a universally and phenominally popular Sci-fi war book. While there are plenty of Sci-Fi war books, only a few are considered "great" Although I may conceed and slide Enders Game up and expand it to a top 3.

2.Considering the book was written in the mid 70's when population problems were considered an issue its not a horrible point. Plus overpopulation is still a popular debate in the scientific community. Future society with future tech may squeeze more people into less space than the human mind could possibly take.

3. The allegory was less about the actual homosexuality and more about the alienness of coming back to a home where everything had changed. It was a common experience for vietnam vets (and the author Haldeman was one) Mainly I think the author intended it to have more shock value than anything. Especially taking in to account a mid 70's Sci-fi fanbase that was coming to grips with Sci-fi of the 60's.

[Skar]

On the surface that plot seems very similar to the plot of Starship troopers except that’s where Haldeman decided to diverge wildly from the bright eyed patriotism of Heinlen. Haldemans soldiers are bright, thinking humans who aren’t particularly enthused about being in the Army, they cry when friends die, they space out, do drugs, and disassociate themselves from the horror in their lives.

I'm intrigued that you think Heinlein's soldiers were not bright or emotionally involved in their lives.  Is it because they were portrayed as having "bright eyed patriotism" that you think they were stupid and unfeeling?  Or is it that they volunteered that marks them as stupid?

Not having read the book I can't say with any authority but from what you describe, the difference between the Taurans and the Bugs is the fact that the bugs bombed Earth and the Taurans didn't. Kind of a telling point if you're going to compare the two.

From your description "The Forever War" sounds like just another anti-soldier diatribe.  I'm surprised that didn't bug you, being a volunteer in the military and all.

[Mad Dr Jeffe]

The "bright eyed patriotism" in Starship troopers did bother me yes. But the main fault is that Heinlens characters arent all that deep to begin with in lots of his books. Not that I meant to imply that his soldiers were stupid. Id like to think I never implied that at all. But we dont see that side much in Starship troopers, because Heinlen just doesnt give us the time. For him the War is more important than the people, generally, (however there are a few key exceptions.
Starship troopers is a variation on a theme he developed early with an emotionally immature boy eventually surpassing his father (Heinlen has an Oedipal thing)

The reason I didnt hate Forever War for its lack of patriotism is threefold.
1. It was one of the first real sci-fi war books to say ... hey maybe fighting in space isnt all that glorious after all.

2.Real fighting occurs, its bloody, and desperate, and often humans arent fighting with an advantage.

3. Its definately not anti-soldier. It portrays a more accurate soldierly persona, or at least more accurate from my perspective as a soldier than almost every other Sci-fi novel I have read. Sure there are a few changes, mixed genders and free sex at the beginning but mostly they come across as real soldiers. They arent saints, or boy scouts, they dont always do the things they should or want to do, they squnder their money, their leave time, they grumble, but at the end of the day, they get the job done.

It is important to realize that Mandella and his unit arent Volunteers like us Skar, they were drafted. Mandella also has lots of chances to get out of the military, but doesnt and even though the reasons are sometimes complex they are pretty real too.

For instance, I considered mustering out this year, but decided against it because I havent gotten an associates degree yet. Its easier to do that while Im in. Mandella doesnt get out because his degree is now meaningless, (Physics changes a lot in 1500 years) and he will have difficulty getting a job outside of the Army unless he gets training.

I think this book has merit, even as an anti war book because its author brings a sense of realism to the sentiment. Something that is often missed by anit-war writers who have never had to deal with the actual elephant in the room... ie. War.

[Mad Dr Jeffe]

The bigger difference between the Taurans and the Bugs is that no human knows what they look like, or anything about them at the beginning of the book.

Also
Spoiler..... (skip if you think you might want to read the book.




Plus untill humans came they had eradicated war in their civilization. They are a hive minded alien race, and were expanding outward into the galaxy.
Humans, also expanding but with worse technolgy lost several ships due to accidents and decided that they had to have been caused by something.
When they came across a Tauran ship they attacked vaporizing it completely a Tauran ship got away in that encounter and very quickly they learned to rearm their civilization.

[Entsuropi]

Jade, you have to remember that a lot of Sci Fi authors couldn't give tuppence about technology, realism or any of that. It's all about using sci fi to create messages and themes. That's why William Gibson was writing about the internet 2 decades before he ever started using it himself.

Of course, there is some sci fi that doesn't work that way - the Red Mars series, the Transhuman Space setting for GURPS are both examples where the technology and such is carefully thought out.

[Mad Dr Jeffe]

the key science element of the novel is sound....
Relativity.

And it changes our idea of intersteller war bigtime. Would we be as quick to fight if we knew we'd come back 20 years later and be close to the same age we left at, while our friends and family aged... or 100 years... or 1000. Not to mention, how do you pay someone for something like that,...

[cyan10101]

hoe.  that is hilarious.

[Mad Dr Jeffe]

Man thats annoying,... I dont think I wrote Hoe, Im positive I wrote Joe...
So I dont know what happened.

Grrr

[The Jade Knight]

I didn't know the names, so I didn't bother correcting them. . .  however, "Hoe" has now been changed to "Joe".


At any rate, some of the discussion you bring up here would have done well in the review.

[Mad Dr Jeffe]

didnt realize it untill you guys brought it up

[Skar]

It is important to realize that Mandella and his unit aren't Volunteers like us Skar, they were drafted.

Fair enough.  And, of course, Vietnam had a lot of drafted soldiers in it, maybe including Haldeman, so that's fair enough for him to be writing about that situation.  I just got my back up over the dichotomy (not-bright vs. bright) you presented in those two sentences I quoted.  If you didn't mean it that way I withdraw my objection.

Of course, WWI and WWII and the Civil War all had largely drafted armies as well but we don't get the "soldiering is evil" mantra from most books about those wars.  

It's probably pretty obvious I have a huge chip on my shoulder about Viet Nam and the largely false impressions touted around by the press and the liberal academic establishment concerning it.  Having served in combat in a country where Marijuana and heroin were insanely easy to get (Afghanistan) I can tell you just how likely it is that any actual fighter (thus excluding the remfs who outnumber the fighters something like 8 to 1 and have a penchant for making up macho stories about themselves) would either take drugs or allow those on whom they depended daily for their lives to take them, draftee or not.  Not at all likely.  

[Mad Dr Jeffe]

actually my fathers personal experiences in Vietnam tend to agree with the history as presented by the media and he's a 25 year Veteren with the Silver Star. And having sat through his 10,000 slide show from all the pictures he took in country it got pretty bad. But like everything in military life, it didnt happen all the time. See thats the thing people dont get about the military. Theres a lot of downtime, even when your in the Front. So dad has pictures of stuff that happened in Saigon, that ... well he never showed his mother thats for sure. Now 90% of it was just drinking, but as Morale fell in the last few years of the war things went down the toilet. The Draft was the biggest problem, but also the fact that the war just dragged on and on. 10 years, its a long time, and it wasnt a popular war. Draftees had less of a reason to get behind Vietnam than say Korea or World War II. Since they didnt understand the fight, or why they were there, in fact since they resented being there they got involved in some horrible stuff. The big issue was morale.
To say that the stuff never happened is kind of looking at the later war through blinders. The Army has tons of released documents about the drug trade, and drug problem and crime that exploded after about 1971 in vietnam. Especially the Heroin problem.  In fact, its one of the main reasons why the army has lobbied against the draft since the Vietnam war inspite of low recruiting numbers.

Its not at all an isolated occurance either. Alcohol was a huge problem in World War II even on the front line, and the most common offense prosecuted for the duration was in fact drunkeness.

Now that isnt meant to impune the proffesionalism of our military, which beats every standard the world has when it comes to soldiery.
The army, heck the whole military has learned a lot of lessons from vietnam, and soldiers are not only educated about drugs, (and tested for them which is a huge deterrant with a zero tolerance policy) but better trained with a better esprit de corps than the draftees of the end of the Vietnam war ever were.

as an anecdote, my dad and a bunch of other pilots were in some Mamasan bar at 3 am when the company XO came in; they had been drinking since about 4 pm and were all really drunk. The XO walks up to the table and says...
"ok, how many beers did you have" to each man.

He gets the numbers from about half the guys (the rest cant remember or are too drunk to string a sentace together) and then says "Ok, well If you remembered how many beers you had your sober enough to fly, you got a mission at 0600, now get back to base for your briefing."

Not only was going to the Bar off limits anyway and drinking prohibited in the field, but it was doubly taboo for pilots at the time. Course no one ever got UMJ, or administative punishment for it either.