Joe Haldeman wrote 'Forever War' after his service in Vietnam. It was published in the mid 70's and won the Hugo award for '76. Along with 'Starship Troopers', it is considered one of the cornerstones of military sci-fi. I'd heard about it for years but this was the first time I've read it.
The book is about a college student named William Mandella who has been drafted into an interplanetary war. The story starts about twenty years after the Vietnam war and the draft has changed to include both men and women and designed to get the brightest people out there. Military units are co-ed and highly promiscuous.
Travel between stars is now possible but only at certain gravitational places in space. As humanity sent colony ships out they have become enmeshed in a war with a race they've dubbed the Taurans. The battles are fought over the key gravitational points. Communication between the races is impossible (or at least so difficult that it doesn't happen). Mandella's first contact with the Taurans is something of a massacre, probably a fight against civilians.
Travel involves enormous relativistic changes so while a mission might take only a few weeks for the soldiers, years and years have passed back on Earth. This was the most effective part of the story to me. Mandella survives the incredibly high casualty rate and is promoted but literally hundreds have years have passed in the meantime bringing huge social changes back on Earth. The most significant change is a government sponsored move to homosexuality as a way to combat overpopulation.
There were impressive parts to this book but I was kind of underwhelmed. The military shown here is bumbling and unprofessional. Which is certainly a reflection of the Vietnam era experience but incredibly unlikely over a centuries long campaign. The economic effect of a long war was unconvincing. The idea of a government that could maintain hardcore policies like a war effort or population control for centuries is laughable.
A good but not great book.
2 comments:
Oddly enough, Peder, I had much the same reaction when I read it in college; "good, but not great".
It seemed to me, and admittedly I *do* like Heinlein's stuff more, that both Haldeman and Heinlein were writing more to make overt societal points with their best-known military SF works, and I looked at the way Haldeman had set up his military situation and had almost the same reaction you did (it didn't help that I'd taken ROTC courses or was a military historian).
When I started reading David Drake (another Vietnam-vet-turned-milSF-author), I saw that there was a different course to take; Drake was a member of the 11th Armored Cav., and takes the tack that soldiers and politics/politicians shouldn't mix (his take from VN); when they do, things go badly. The trouble is that there are too many Drake-clones on the shelves who think that more guns=COOL, rather than looking at the underlying philosophy that Mr. Drake takes with his writing.
It's not to everyone's tastes, but it's not bad, either.
You and I both have a more general trust in the military than Haldeman. Which makes sense given when he wrote his. I agree with you that I'll take the Heinlein version too.
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