The Forever War review

The Forever War is generally thought of as a SF-classic with everlasting appeal. Not only a SF-classic, but even a straight out American classic of literature. 3 different quotes on my edition rave in one way or the other about the book being up there with the big boys of non-genre, non-pulp literature: “the most important war novel written since Vietnam”.

I disagree. It’s not that the book hasn’t aged well: it hasn’t, but that’s not its problem. I never felt it being a very good book, and I think it never has been. It is not without merit, there’s excellent parts, but overall there’s not enough meat on the bone. It works as an allegory, but not as a story. Moreover, its ethics are pathetically superficial: a pretty spectacular fail, especially for an indicting war novel. More on that later, also in the comments.

I guess most SF-fans know that Joe Haldeman was a Vietnam veteran with a Purple Heart, and that The Forever War actually is about the Vietnam war – it is even considered a critique of that war; in the introduction Haldeman recollects having a hard time getting it published because of that. It’s a personal book: the protagonist’s name, William Mandela, clearly is an anagram of Haldeman.

So, what’s the good here?

There’s quite some good Hard SF ideas spread throughout the book. The main thing the book is famous for is the fact that the soldiers fighting the Tauran aliens age a lot less than the people back on Earth, because of the effects of relativistic time dilation. So, when they return from a tour, centuries have passed. It is the book’s most important narrative idea, and I guess it was indeed original in its time. It also seems like an interesting way to get across the estrangement a lot of soldiers returning home report feeling – also those fighting in today’s wars.

Seems that way: yes, when Mandela returns to Earth he doesn’t feel at home – but that’s not because the war has changed him, but because Earth itself has changed. A messy metaphor, to say the least, and one that already hints at Haldeman’s failure to take responsibility himself, as I’ll discuss later. He hasn’t changed, it’s the others. On top of that, this faux estrangement effect is marred by the fact that Haldeman chose to overdo it: the Earth that Mandela revisits the first time is a caricatural dystopia, especially to these contemporary eyes – the picture Haldeman paints might have been believable to a reader in the 1970ies, but it isn’t anymore. Still, as I said, the fact that the book didn’t age well is not the main problem.

Other good stuff includes Haldeman’s prose. It’s not full of interesting images or poetic phrasing, but it does the job and doesn’t get in the way. That’s something. At times it even manages to convey the harsh nature of war and death.

a few centimeters above the pubis a membraned loop of gut was protruding…

It’s not a very long book (265 pages), and the first 80 or so are actually great. As a lot of stories about war, it starts with the obligatory training sequence (think Full Metal Jacket, but in outer space) and Haldeman does a great job describing getting used to fighting suits, the conditions in a space ship at a constant 2 Gs, etc., etc. It’s all pretty bleak and pretty harsh. As a reader, you are still left with a sense of anticipation, since it’s only the setup, and “the most important war novel since Vietnam” is only getting started.

Then the fighting actually starts, and the book quickly becomes pretty repetitive & even boring. At first it’s not so bad, since we get to meet the aliens, but once their novelty wears off, all that remains is, well, fighting. And fighting is just fighting.

Especially if you have no characters to care for… The Forever War is a first person novel, and Mandela is the only character we get to know a bit – but don’t expect a lot of depth either. It is utterly baffling, but even with him there is absolutely no character development whatsoever. Sure, he has a love interest, but when she parts for an other tour and it is obvious to both they will never meet again, it doesn’t seem to affect Mandela at all. And yes, when he returns to Earth he doesn’t fit in, but as I already explained, not because he changed. There’s some emotion at the very end, but there’s hardly any emotional connections to be made. One might argue that war dehumanizes people, that it numbs feelings and makes cynical bastards of us all. But even that is not the case – I didn’t experience feelings of paralyzing dread or cynicism. The Mandela at the beginning is simply the same Mandela at the end of the novel, except for a higher military rank and some years of experience.

That’s what I meant when I wrote this book works as an allegory, but not as a story. True, the pointlessness of war is illustrated. Its repetitive nature. The carnage too. As a story, it falls short: there’s not even an interesting story arc dealing with the war itself. It’s not clear why the conflict started, it’s not clear who’s winning, we don’t have a view on the strategies, we don’t even get to know the enemy. And again, as an allegory for a soldier participating in the Vietnam war all that’s probably pretty on the money, but it doesn’t make a good story, let alone without character development.

What’s also lacking is ethics. One would think that a veteran like Haldeman would have interesting things to say about moral responsibility, duty, guilt, the nature of suffering, and the likes. Aside from a few fancy Von Clausewitz quotes, there’s only this shallow passage, after Mandela – aided by hypnotic conditioning – killed some aliens.

I spent a long time after that telling myself over and over that it hadn’t been me who so gleefully carved up those frightened, stampeding creatures. Back in the twentieth century, they had established to everybody’s satisfaction that “I was just following orders” was an inadequate excuse for inhuman conduct… but what can you do when the orders come from deep down in that puppet master of the unconscious? Worst of all was the feeling that perhaps my actions weren’t all that inhuman. Ancestors only a few generations back would have done the same thing, even to their fellow man, without any hypnotic conditioning. I was disgusted with the human race, disgusted with the army and horrified at the prospect of living with myself for another century or so… Well, there was always brain-wipe.

Brain-wipe… Yup. At the end of the book, we get the following additional analysis, in a comment about the final military base left standing…

It exists only as a rendezvous point for returnees and as a monument to human stupidity. And shame.

Stupidity. And shame. Deep. The feeling I got reading this book was that it was a self-centered, semi-apologetic rant by Haldeman. If this is supposed to be an important book about Vietnam, where is the suffering of the victims? Yes, some cruel massacres are described, there’s techno-gore enough. But since Haldeman chose for the allegorical victims to be truly alien, grotesque monsters even, we do not sympathize with them. We do not feel their pain.

So, this book is mainly about the boredom of the imperialist Western warrior in-between battles. And a tiny wee bit about his conflicting feelings – a tiny, tiny wee bit: it is mainly just the 2 quotes above. And it’s all the army’s fault anyway! They trick you into signing up! It’s a whining book.

It is also about sex. Really. Now that I think of it, The Forever War really is first and foremost a book about sex. Haldeman’s take on homosexuality has to be read to believed. And women soldiers are all prostitutes too! Let’s just leave it at that.

This book surely is not about the complexity, emotions and tragic nuances of war. Should you read it? The first 80 pages for sure, and the next 80 to be baffled. After that, don’t expect any insights, nor redemption

Alice in Wonderland

So begins the tale of Alice, following a curious White Rabbit down a rabbit-hole and falling into Wonderland. A fantastical place, where nothing is quite as it seems: animals talk, nonsensical characters confuse, Mad Hatter’s throw tea parties and the Queen plays croquet. Alice’s attempts to find her way home become increasingly bizarre, infuriating and amazing in turn. A beloved classic, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland has continued to delight readers, young and old for over a century.

Review: it’s a cliché and cheesy and I hate when people say it, but…ALL OF THE STARS

THIS IS MY FAVORITE BOOK.

No qualifier. No excuse. No “one of my favorites.” This one is it, y’all.

Well, also Through the Looking Glass. But THAT’S PRACTICALLY THE SECOND HALF OF THE SAME BOOK. (And other examples of my inability to make decisions or commit in any way to anything.)

I currently have 18 copies of this book. I’ve attempted to read it at least annually for the past three years. And by “annually,” I mean I last revisited this book less than nine months ago.

But hey, it was a different year then, technically speaking.

How do I even review this? I don’t know where to begin. (Just a heads up that my obsessive personality is going to become verrrrry clear as this review progresses. I’m not proud. This is who I am, you guys. I was a member of the fandoms of some teen pop sensation or other for nearly ten consecutive years. I’m no longer thirteen but I still need an outlet. Honestly I’m quite afraid that if I don’t have an obsession, I’ll become a drug addict. Lots of pent up energy.)

Well, I’ll say that I always, always, always feel enveloped by this book. I have never picked this up without feeling instantly submersed in Wonderland. And it’s really my favorite place to be. It’s hard to feel unhappy when you’re in the greatest setting ever created.

And there’s that. I firmly believe this is the most amazing and beautiful and confusing and curious setting of all time. It’s immersive, and it’s strange, and it’s so unique and fantastic and creative and I love it so much. I can come up with even more loosely positive adjectives if that overwhelming number didn’t suffice.

Wonderland is my Hogwarts. While many readers pray their letters just got lost in the mail, I’m constantly hoping I’ll see a white rabbit in a waistcoat and fall down, down, down into what must be the center of the earth.

I love Alice and her curiosity. She may also be my favorite character ever. She’s funny and sweet and childish and such a blast to read about. Her reactions to everything are so, so funny. Her curiosity always outweighs confusion and fear. I’d like to wake up one day and be Alice. I’ll likely become one of those creeps who pays millions for plastic surgery in order to “resemble” some celebrity or other.

On an unrelated note, anyone have millions of dollars they’re trying to get rid of?

I’m also fiercely protective of this book. I constantly pick up retellings only to be utterly disappointed. (Like Heartless. Get out of here with your shoddy Carroll-stealing.) DO NOT, DO NOT! GET ME STARTED ON THE TIM BURTON FILM ADAPTATION. Horrific. Alice, an adult? Alice, engaged? Alice FIGHTING THE GODDAMN JABBERWOCK?

But I do love the original animated Disney adaptation. There’s a certain quality to the book that’s captured within that film, which I haven’t found recreated in any other retelling or use of the setting or adaptation.

Oh, and one more thing, while I’m here.

THIS BOOK ISN’T ABOUT DRUGS, YOU SURFACE-LEVEL INTERPRETERS OF SYMBOLISM. It’s not that easy, boo.

In the words of BBC News, “[the drug] references may say more about the people making them than the author.”

Lewis Carroll isn’t thought to have been a user of drugs, the Caterpillar was smoking tobacco, and the mushroom is no more magic than the various cakes Alice eats.

Honestly, the drug reading is simple and boring. It’s such a stretch to attempt to read each character as a different substance. And scrolling through countless quasi-psychedelic GIFs to find actual ones was irritating, too. Ah, yes, real art: taking images from a 1951 children’s film but messing with the colors and movement until it looks like nothing more than a trigger for epilepsy. Enough, Tumblr.

Alice in Wonderland carries as much or as little significance as you want it to. It’s everything from a mindless romp in an imaginative land to a depiction of the effects of a ruthlessly authoritarian system of justice.

Just have fun with it.

And please, for the love of God, stop applying your weird psychedelic edits to a Disney movie.

Note on the audiobook: This time around, I listened to the audiobook, to switch things up. Scarlett Johansson read it. I loved her funny accents and hated her overly-acted narration. A mixed bag.

Bottom line: This is my favoritest and I doubt it will be dethroned anytime soon. Come at me, every other bo

Forever Peace

In 2043 there’s a series of wars between an alliance of advanced nations against third world nations. The allied army consists of robots remote-controlled by soldiers who can be thousands of miles away and use neural implants to have a realistic experience of the battles they fight.

The alliance also has nanoforge technology, a form of nanotechnology that allows them to build any complex structure starting from basic elements. This has enabled the creation of a welfare state where common people can receive a free basic supply of food and basic necessities.

Julian Class is a physicist but also a draftee and is part of a platoon that controls a soldierboy, a group of warrior robots. The members of the platoon are linked together so during military actions they merge almost becoming one person, but this also brings risks to their mental health.

Amanda Harding, Julian’s girlfriend, is a scientist as well and during their work they discover that a particle accelerator produced by nanoforges in the worst case scenario could trigger a new Big Bang. When they try to publish the results of their research however someone not only blocks them but starts hunting them down.

Hope comes from another of Julian’s contacts who reveals that the same technology that allows soldiers to connect during battles can be used to increase their empathy to the point that they’d refuse to kill another human being.

Different factions within the army have different agendas for the future: the outcome of the clash between them will determine the fate of all humanity.

Joe Haldeman is the author of the critically acclaimed “The Forever War”: over the years he’s been proposed many times to write a sequel and eventually he wrote various ones but at that time he preferred to write “Forever Peace”, a novel still concerning the issues of violence and war but totally detached from the previous one.

Joe Haldeman fought in Vietnam so when he talks about war he does it having seen it first hand. In “Forever Peace” he suggests the possible socio-political and technological developments in the coming decades to describe the possible future in the middle of the XXI century. While in “The Forever War” there’s an interstellar war in the distant future between humans and an alien species in “Forever Peace” wars are similar to today’s wars between advanced nations and third world nations.

The scientific part of the novel isn’t particularly developed: Joe Haldeman isn’t a hard science fiction writer, rather he’s interested in the socio-political side of the story and the characters reactions to the situations they’re involved.

A peculiarity of this novel is that it’s partly narrated in first person from the perspective of Julian Class and partly in third person, often in the description of Julian’s actions. This makes sense in a novel in which one of the bases is that people can connect through their neural implants so the point of view of a person can change.

The first part of the novel is rather slow in describing the situation of the war and the characters, the narrative accelerates in the second half, maybe even too much so the ending seems a bit rushed.

Considering the prizes “Forever Peace” won, this novel seems a little overrated but overall the quality is good and it’s interesting to read. Besides the possible technological developments made up for the novel there’s a description of a socio-political situation that in many ways eerily recalls the present

Starship Troopers

This was the very last of my holiday reading books, although I had been back from my holiday for several weeks before I finished it. My friend JonBoy told me to read this years ago—I think we were still in high school when he recommended it—but my first exposure to it was from the movie made in 1997. What most people know is that the film is almost nothing like the book; Paul Verhoeven satirizes the military society that Heinlein describes, where only combat veterans are permitted to vote and the expansion of humanity across the stars is as god-given a right as Manifest Destiny was to the settlers of the American West. The book is still fascinating, though: indeed, its interest lies precisely in its extremely right-wing politics, because the thought processes behind this society are overwhelmingly rational. The problem with them is that they are founded on premises that we now (mostly) believe to be erroneous.

The book follows Johnny Rico, heir to an immense manufacturing fortune, who signs up for military service along with his best friend from high school, Carl. (One of the many things that’s different about the book: Rico barely sees Carl after they join up, and hears later that he’s been killed in action. In the film, the Carl character is played by Neil Patrick Harris and his ability as an empath makes him an increasingly scary rising star in military R&D.) In theory, Rico is being trained as an infantryman, a mud foot, a grunt—almost but not quite cannon fodder—to take part in wars against the Bugs. The Bugs are generally described as being arachnoid, but they’re not:

They are arthropods who happen to look like a madman’s idea of a giant, intelligent spider, but their organization, psychological and economic, is more like that of ants or termites; they are communal entities, the ultimate dictatorship of the hive.

There are workers, warriors, brains, and queens in Bug society. Workers are harmless and infantrymen don’t waste time or ammo on them. Warriors are the terrifying ones; brains and queens are both hidden underground. The ultimate aim of Rico’s final mission—and the primary focus of the 1997 film—is an attempt to capture either a brain or a queen, in order to learn more about them and possibly trade them for human captives.

What’s interesting about the book is the distinct impression you get that Heinlein really doesn’t care very much about his plot. The final mission, which is by far the most exciting section of the novel (apart from the in medias res first chapter), takes up about sixty pages in a book of 275. The vast majority of the rest of it is comprised of two things: detailed writing about life in the infantry and about the army in general, and expository chunks cunningly disguised as discussions in Rico’s History & Moral Philosophy classes. (The technique is a lot like the bits of Nineteen Eighty-Four that are supposed to be from Emmanuel Goldstein’s book.)

Amazingly, Heinlein makes both sorts of section interesting. Infantry training—any kind of military training—is primarily psychological. Heinlein himself graduated from the Naval Academy in Annapolis and was a naval officer, and although he’s writing about the army (and therefore has his characters evincing a tribal scorn for Navy men), the principles of training members of either service are very similar. When he writes about the techniques used to mould men into a fighting unit, you can see the beginnings of the political philosophy that shapes both Starship Troopers and, I think, the worldview of many right-wing voters:

It was the firm opinion of every recruit that this was sheer meanness, calculated sadism, fiendish delight of witless morons in making other people suffer.

It was not. It was too scheduled, too intellectual, too efficiently and impersonally organized to be cruelty for the sick pleasure of cruelty; it was planned like surgery for purposes as unimpassioned as those of a surgeon. Oh, I admit that some of the instructors may have enjoyed it but I don’t know that they did—and I do know (now) that the psych officers tried to weed out any bullies in selecting instructors. They looked for skilled and dedicated craftsmen to follow the art of making things as tough as possible for a recruit; a bully is too stupid, himself too emotionally involved, and too likely to grow tired of his fun and slack off, to be efficient.

The dogma that being cruel to be kind is effective in areas of life other than military training is what underpins things like “bootstraps philosophy”, harsh prison sentences for relatively minor misdemeanors (i.e. New York City’s “broken windows policy”), and welfare reform that disqualifies all but the most abjectly poverty-stricken from government assistance. The idea that the only people qualified to bring such policies to fruition are those clever enough to be disengaged is what spawns public servants like Michael Gove.

Not that a Gove figure has any place in the world of Starship Troopers, where you cannot even stand for office unless you have served a term of duty in the armed forces.

None of the rhetoric actually struck me as new or particularly horrifying for quite a long time, and given what I knew of Heinlein’s political reputation, I was surprised by this. Much of what he says makes a certain amount of sense even—especially—to the historically oppressed (e.g. non-white, non-male, non-cissexual people). Like this:

Violence, naked force, has settled more issues in history than has any other factor, and the contrary opinion is wishful thinking at its worst. Breeds that forget this basic truth have always paid for it with their lives and freedoms.

That’s one of Starship Troopers‘ most famous quotations, and if you look at it with thoroughly objective eyes, it is not wrong. Violence is our go-to solution, from the individual and immature (punch our brother for his toy truck) to the collective and political (invade a neighboring country for its oil). It’s not nice, and there do exist other ways of arbitrating disputes, but violence in one form or another is a trump card that either side of an argument always knows it can play.

What did make me flinch, and where Heinlein is pretty clearly working with facts we’d now consider outdated, is his defense of corporal and capital punishment. In a History & Moral Philosophy class, the instructor’s entire argument rests on the legitimacy of a simile between a misbehaving human youth and a puppy that needs training.

“These children were often caught; police arrested batches every day. Were they scolded? Yes, often scathingly. Were their noses rubbed in it? Rarely. News organs and officials usually kept their names secret—in many places the law so required for criminals under eighteen. Were they spanked? Indeed not! Many had never been spanked even as small children; there was a widespread belief that any punishment involving pain did a child permanent psychic damage…

“While a judge should be benevolent in purpose, his awards should cause the criminal to suffer, else there is no punishment—and pain is the basic mechanism built into us by millions of years of evolution.”

This is a perfectly logical line of reasoning if the premise is sound—if it is in fact true that nothing is a better, more effective deterrent for children and young adults than physical pain and humiliation—but it isn’t true; every behavioral study we have on juvenile psychology supports the opposite conclusion.

I ha

ve always found it difficult to handle writing like this, because it feels too much like a free pass for bigotry if I just label it “old-fashioned” and consider it no more. The Chaos, when I mentioned it to him, made a helpful suggestion: that the difference between someone truly being “of their era” and someone being “objectively” racist, sexist, reactionary, etc. is how they react when confronted with contradictory evidence. I suppose you’d have to read interviews with Heinlein at a later stage in his life (he died in 1988) to determine whether his views adapted; I haven’t done that, so I can’t write him off as a libertarian loon just yet. And I would very much like to read Stranger In a Strange Land (themes: culture shock, colonialism, nature vs. nurture) and The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress (AI sentience, anarchy). Heinlein’s talent for explaining the subculture of the infantry, and the promising nature of his plot in Starship Troopers—even if he doesn’t make the most of it—suggests that his less overtly political novels might be real winners.