Find The Forever War Author Joe Haldeman Available As Volume

Forever War is what is happening on the Earth since the most ancient times till these days.
I guess there wasnt a single day without war in the entire history of humankind,
“Tonight were going to show you eight silent ways to kill a man, The guy who said that was a sergeant who didnt look five years older than me.
So if hed ever killed a man in combat, silently or otherwise, hed done it as an infant.
”
Does it sound fantastic No, it doesnt, It sounds very real.
“The planet, which we hadn't bothered to name, was a chunk of black rock without any normal star close enough to give it heat.
At first it was visible only by the absence of where its bulk cut off their light, but as we dropped closer we could see subtle variations in the blackness of its surface.
We were coming down on the hemisphere opposite the Taurans' outpost,
Our recon had shown that their camp sat in the middle of a flat lava plain several hundred kilometers in diameter.
It was pretty primitive compared to other Tauran bases UNEF had encountered, but there wouldn't be any sneaking up on it.
We were going to careen over the horizon some fifteen klicks from the place, four ships converging simultaneously from different directions, all of us decelerating like mad, hopefully to drop right in their laps and come up shooting.
There would be nothing to hide behind, ”
Therefore interstellar wars would be for the mankind just business as usual,
I dont want the future like this, Joe Haldeman, a Vietnam veteran, wrote The Forever War in the seventies, and his novel soon became a classic of the socalled “military science fiction” genre, in keeping with and way better than Heinleins sitelinkStarship Troopers.
The book tells the story of an intergalactic war with an alien race, that spans well over a millennium, as seen from Private Mandella.
It starts with drill instruction and training on a freezing satellite of Pluto, expanding further on until the conflict reaches the Great Magellanic Cloud, away from our galaxy.


As expected from a novel such as this one, there are some very thrilling and sometimes disheartening combat scenes.
The minutiae of military life, its protocol, language and techniques, are vividly and more often than not ironically described.
And in the midst of all this, there is a forever love story with Private Marygay it is touching to think that this female character bears the name of Haldemans wife.


But a few things struck me in particular:

First, there is a very clever and knowledgeable use of physics, especially the theory of relativity: the war takes place in such a large setting that travelling from one place to the next at nearly the speed of light produces stunning time distortions.
In so doing, the main character lives and witnesses the evolution of mankind through the centuries.
This device has later been reused in science fiction, for instance in Nolansmovie Interstellar.


Second is that, in this vast period of time, human economics, language, way of life and, particularly, gender politics and sexuality evolves in unpredictable ways.


Last, and certainly not least: when around the middle of the book Mandella comes back to Earth and civilian life after his first campaign away from the Solar System, life on Earth feels more alien to him than the distant starfields.
I suspect that this feeling of subjective time distortion is shared by many war veterans when, after a time in Vietnam, in the MiddleEast or any other “forever war”, they finally come back home.


The novel ends with these ironic words: “Theyearslong war had begun on false pretenses and only continued because the two races were unable to communicate”.
It is not at all improbable that this could be said of quite a few wars in history.
I'm really surprised this has such a high rating, There's really not much to it, Okay, it presents a cool concept, What would it really be like to fight a war with an alien race across the vast reaches of space Even with something that allowed you to "jump" vast distances you would have to get to these places.
As the ship you travel in nears the speed of light, time for you slows down.
So for the main character who was born in, he returns from the war inhaving aged only a few years but the world he knows is no longer there.
  Of course along with this is all the technology changes that comes along, The main character will go out on a mission and come back and find all this new technology waiting.
New weapons, medicine, food, language, customs, well you can imagine, All this was interesting but honestly, it wasn't enough, The plot almost saved the story, almost, Have you ever been told to do something and the whole time you're doing it you keep saying to yourself "this is so stupid why am I doing this" That was what the war with the aliens was like for this whole book.
 Finally, character development: William Mandella is the main character and other than having a high I.
Q. and also being physical fit you never really learn anything about him, I never developed any connection with him, Mostly because I didn't know anything about him and just didn't care one way or the other.
I think I'll skip the rest of this series!
Conscripttobrutal bootcamptofarawayalienwar, Countless novels have followed this story structure, aping Heinleins Starship Troopers with mixed results.


Like me, you might be getting tired of encountering this storyline, Tired of reading what too often turns out to be Full Metal Jacket In Space Minus The Social Criticism.


If thats the case, borrow twenty bucks, get to a bookstore and order a copy of The Forever War.
This is militaryflavoured bootcamptowar Science Fiction in its finest form, as refreshing and thought provoking as it no doubt was when it was released in.
Like Starship Troopers, this book is a template for the lesser works that have followed it.


The story is a simple one, William Mandella is conscripted and sent to fight in a brutal, bloody war with an alien species.
The battles he must fight are so far from Earth that the timedilation effect of highspeed space travel turns his subjective months at war into years on Earth, his years into decades.
Each time he returns to Earth human society has changed further, and Mandellas is less and less able to fit in, to feel welcome, to feel at home.


From this simple premise Haldeman spins a story of real insight and empathy, an extended allegory for Haldemans own war Vietnam and the tragedy of soldiers who return from conflicts to find both society and themselves changed so much that the only place they really belong is back on the front lines.


This isnt a typical blazingbeamcannons military SF novel, Haldeman doesnt obsess over laser wattages or projectile calibres, instead focusing his keen writers eye on the impact war has upon its participants.
Haldeman has explored this territory a number of times, most successfully in All My Sins Remembered and some of his short stories theres a real pearler A Mind of His Own in a collection of his work called Infinite Dreams, and he brings an authentic and sensitive voice to his SF.
When I found out after reading this book that Haldeman was badly wounded in Vietnam I wasnt surprised he writes war in a way I have very rarely seen in SF, less pewpew!/Kaboom!, and more understanding of the pain and suffering, both physical and otherwise, that soldiers go through.


Haldemans novel equals Heinleins classic in its social observations and intellectual heft, but in my opinion The Forever War is a more empathetic work, engendering genuine pathos for Mandella and his comrades.
It really is a landmark classic of Science Fiction,
Futility.

If I had to choose one theme for sitelinkThe Forever War, it would be futility.
As a reader, I knew the futility the "but I'm no military leader" characters felt, as they were recruited to fight an alien race, for reasons they didn't understand, to protect a world and people they returned to find they could neither relate to nor appreciate.


To truly value this novel, one must realize it mirrors the issues faced by those who fought in Vietnam, and likely countless other wars and conflicts.
sitelinkHaldeman himself is a veteran of the Vietnam War If you know this going in, you will respect and praise sitelinkThe Forever War for all the nuances of warrelated survivor guilt, isolation, fear, alienation and betrayal it exposes.
For example, when the main character, Mandella, has returned after his tour, he doesn't recognize Earth.
He feels he's left no choice but to leave his mother and world again, He is an outlander, escaping a now alien Earth, to return to the army and the war.
His exiting thought left me mournful:

"But I couldn't shake the feeling that we were going home.
"

If you delve in, unaware of the context, or did not actually live through that dismaying part of American history, this novel may seem to you just another classic scifi book.
But don't let this novel be just some action book you've read, when the author went to such great lengths to help us, the readers, embrace the depth of futility only war can produce in man.
The main character William Mandella is among the first recruits sent off to fight an alien species.
The only problem The distances are so vast that every fasterthanlight jump means decades have passed back on earth.
With each campaign that Mandella fights, his home planet changes until it is almost unrecognizable, As many readers have noted, Haldeman's book is first and foremost a great novel of war and its effects on society.
You can

tell it was written at the close of Vietnam, as it speaks to the soldier's dilemma coming home from a divisive conflict.
Some elements of the novel haven't aged as well as others, The idea, for instance, that sexual orientation can be determined by social conditioning is dated and comes across as a bit of a paranoid fantasy.
But for the most part, the novel addresses timeless themes isolation, alienation, patriotism versus skepticism, and the possibility of love in a violent, unforgiving world.
The ending is haunting, and I found myself thinking about this novel for weeks after reading it.
.