re:mote voices

Title: The Forever War
Author: Joe Haldeman
Publisher:Gollancz

William Mandella has been drafted. If he makes it through the rigorous training then he'll be shipped out to face the enemy in ground fighting. After training he is shipped out to an alien planet, to fight an alien race. They started it, destroyed one of our ships. This is the start of The Forever War. A conflict between two races fought across space and time. Stargates make near instantaneous jumps across vast distances, but to get to the gates, to manoeuvre through space takes time, and with relativity's effect 100s of years pass between each battle, between each journey back home.

Joe Haldeman's novel Forever War was published in 1974, and was influenced by his experiences in Vietnam. From which part of this novel is obviously about being drafted, about how people get dragged into a conflict and how they feel in response to that. How a conflict can drag on, and upon returning home how things can have changed. The political atmosphere before and during conflict can shift, customs can shift, language can shift. By making this a science fiction novel Haldeman does two things, he provides a certain separation from the actual events influencing the writing, while also allowing himself the scope to take things to a greater extreme. How do you solve a population explosion? You encourage homosexuality. How do you solve economic problems and food shortages? Shift to a calory based culture, where people work for food, all the whole encouraging self sufficiency. Just a couple of aspects of societal change that crop up in the centuries of The Forever War.

Of course, one of the most ironic things about this novel is that for all its future speculation, it is the nature of contemporary war that has changed. Reading The Forever War against a background of Iraq, of the film Jarhead being in the cinema, then we see a war that isn't as reliant on ground troops as Haldeman's war. Of course the shape of contemporary warfare like Iraq isn't necessarily representative of the war - a super power invading your average country with the latest technology is not the same as two equally matched/expanding forces like those in this novel.

The Earth based parts of the story are perhaps where The Forever War feels the most dated. Though even there Haldeman still covers territory that remains relevant today. The questions of population, food, and economy, as well as those questions raised by conflict are ones that are still with us 22 years after The Forever War was written.

The Forever War is book one in Gollancz series of SF Masterworks, a series of novels judged to be classics and gathered with the intention of keeping them in print.