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
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