The Forever War by Joe Haldeman
Nicholas Whyte
Review by Nicholas Whyte
(full review with links to other reviews is on my site at
http://explorers.whyte.com/sf/forwar.htm )
This is the seventeenth in a series of reviews of those pieces of
written science fiction and fantasy which have won both the Hugo and
Nebula awards. I have been writing these in alphabetical order by
title, and _The Forever War_ thus happens to come immediately after
its sort-of sequel, _Forever Peace_. Two shorter pieces, Fritz
Leiber's "Catch That Zeppelin!" and Roger Zelazny's "Home is the
Hangman", also won the Hugo and Nebula double that year. Other novels
shortlisted for both awards against _The Forever War_ included Roger
Zelazny's _Doorways in the Sand_, Alfred Bester's _Extro_ aka _The
Computer Connection_, and Robert Silverberg's _The Stochastic Man_ -
while these are by no means duds, none is their authors' greatest work
either; the Hugo and Nebula voters were right to pick _The Forever
War_.
William Mandella is a physics graduate, drafted in the year 1997 to
fight an interstellar war against the unknown Tauran enemy. Because
the battlefields themselves are light-years away, Mandella spends most
of the book slipping forward into the future thanks to time dilation,
and thus becoming progressively more alienated from the society which
he was recruited to serve. But he falls in love with a fellow soldier
(the army of 1997 and later years being gender-balanced) and despite
all obstacles they get back together. The book ends with a birth
announcement from the happy couple - a narrative closure which is also
used by Mary Gentle at the end of her medieval fantasy war novel,
_Ash: A Secret History_.
The sequences portraying life as a soldier, in training or in a combat
situation, are gripping and unforgettable. Haldeman has put a lot of
his experiences as an actual soldier in the Vietnam war into the book.
William is his own middle name, and Mandella almost an anagram of
Haldeman. Mandella's lover has Haldeman's wife's maiden name, Marygay
Potter. The two colossal strengths of the book are the portrayal of
the psychological experience of combat, and the depiction of the
progressive alienation of the soldiers from the rest of humanity,
culminating in the awful revelation that the war was basically a
mistake.
As a civilian veteran of Balkan and Irish conflicts myself, I'm not
unfamiliar with the psychological effects of war on the participants,
and Haldeman gets it right. In a sense the protagonists of the Forever
War are relatively fortunate in that there seem to be very few
civilian casualties directly resulting from the conflict. Not that
they see it that way, as the casualty rate among military participants
is huge, and our hero gains rapid promotion merely for staying alive
(though as a highly intelligent graduate he must have been officer
material anyway).
The military stuff seemed well thought out. I particularly liked the
gimmick of the stasis field, within with electricity doesn't work so
our soldiers have to resort to edged weapons. The science behind it
may well be rubbish but the military implications were sensibly
developed. (And anyone who doubts that the military could possibly
jump at shadows to such an extent as to wage war against an enemy that
wasn't in fact an enemy should consider such recent events as the US
military's hysterical reaction to the International Criminal Court and
its bizarre fixation with National Missile Defense, a project that
will cost vast amounts of money to defend against a threat that is
vanishingly unlikely to transpire.)
However despite the undeniable power of the core message of the book,
much of the packaging is flawed. The book begins in a world where
interstellar space travel has been developed by 1997, which now seems
optimistically premature to the 21st century reader. The first
edition, which actually won the Hugo and Nebula awards, features a
section set in a future Geneva where the UN is now based - a Geneva
where the local population has suddenly started speaking German! And
although there may some day be a gender-balanced army which tolerates
soft drug use, encourages other ranks to say "Fuck you, Sir!" to
officers, and enforces sexual activity among its recruits, this seems
as unlikely now as it must have done in 1975.
The book's biggest problem is its handling of sexuality. In a year
when Samuel R. Delany's _Dhalgren_, Joanna Russ's _The Female Man_,
and Robert Silverberg's _The Stochastic Man_ were pushing the
boundaries of the portrayal of sex in science fiction, _The Forever
War_'s take on the issue seems rather unimaginative. The 1997 army
enforces one-on-one heterosexual activity, with daily rotation of
partners, among its personnel, none of whom appear to be particularly
upset by this. A few decades later, the entire world has become
homosexual as a means of population control, which seems rather
disproportionate. Mandella sticks to his heterosexual guns, and does
not appear in the least tempted to try it the other way (unlike the
hero of Frederik Pohl's _Gateway_ which also won both Hugo and Nebula,
two years later).
And the ending, where our hero retrieves his lost love while the rest
of the human race has surrendered its identity to a race of bisexual
telepathic clones, seemed to me on first reading simply silly. I may
be being unfair to the author here. Haldeman retorts in the
introduction to "A Separate War", in the Robert Silverberg-edited
collection _Far Horizons_, that:
The Forever War does not have a happy ending. Marygay and
William do get back together - the book ends with the
birth announcement of their first child - but they're together on
a prison planet, preserved as genetic curiosities in a
universe where the human race has abandoned its humanity in
a monstrous liaison with its former enemy.
That's all very well as an explanation (twenty years on) of what was
in the author's mind when he wrote it, but it doesn't really come
across on the printed page of the book where the happy ending appears
to be the point of the narrative. And it isn't sufficient, to this
reader anyway, to justify the proliferation of homosexuality followed
by the telepathic clones as a part of the metaphor for the alienation
of Mandella from the rest of the human race; by today's standards this
is either naive or offensive.
To an extent we should forgive the book its anachronisms; we still
enjoy Shakespeare's _Julius Caesar_ even though his depiction of Roman
life (with clocks, hats and doublets) is rather different from ours.
The flaws are real, but the passion is real as well. _The Forever War_
is not a timeless classic, but it is a classic of its own time, and
will no doubt continue to be read for its passion rather than its
predictive accuracy. And after all, sf would be a very boring (and
small) genre if it was actually rated on its ability to predict the
future!
The next review in this series will be of Arthur C. Clarke's Hugo and
Nebula winner, _The Fountains of Paradise_.
Brandon Ray
Nicholas Whyte wrote:
> _The Forever War_ by Joe Haldeman
>
> Review by Nicholas Whyte
>
> (full review with links to other reviews is on my site at
> http://explorers.whyte.com/sf/forwar.htm )
>
> As a civilian veteran of Balkan and Irish conflicts myself, I'm not
> unfamiliar with the psychological effects of war on the participants,
> and Haldeman gets it right. In a sense the protagonists of the Forever
> War are relatively fortunate in that there seem to be very few
> civilian casualties directly resulting from the conflict. Not that
> they see it that way, as the casualty rate among military participants
> is huge, and our hero gains rapid promotion merely for staying alive
> (though as a highly intelligent graduate he must have been officer
> material anyway).
Not necessarily. If you recall, Mandella was drafted as part of the
Elite Conscription Act, which was based on the notion that highly
intelligent kids with appropriate specialties would make good soldiers,
due to the highly technical needs of the modern soldier.
>
> The military stuff seemed well thought out. I particularly liked the
> gimmick of the stasis field, within with electricity doesn't work so
> our soldiers have to resort to edged weapons. The science behind it
> may well be rubbish but the military implications were sensibly
> developed. (And anyone who doubts that the military could possibly
> jump at shadows to such an extent as to wage war against an enemy that
> wasn't in fact an enemy should consider such recent events as the US
> military's hysterical reaction to the International Criminal Court and
> its bizarre fixation with National Missile Defense, a project that
> will cost vast amounts of money to defend against a threat that is
> vanishingly unlikely to transpire.)
I agree that the military could be paranoid in this way, but I don't
agree that these are good examples of it. First and foremost, both of
these issues are being pushed largely by politicians, rather than by the
military per se. Second, although some on the left like to dismiss such
things out of hand, that's not really justified, based on the world we
live in. At the very least, respectable arguments can be made for both
positions.
Haldeman's tripwire that starts the war seems to be much more closely
modeled on the Gulf of Tonkin incident, where a minor encounter (that may
not even have happened at all) was blown up by the military and political
establishment in the U.S. as justification for a major war.
> However despite the undeniable power of the core message of the book,
> much of the packaging is flawed. The book begins in a world where
> interstellar space travel has been developed by 1997, which now seems
> optimistically premature to the 21st century reader. The first
> edition, which actually won the Hugo and Nebula awards, features a
> section set in a future Geneva where the UN is now based - a Geneva
> where the local population has suddenly started speaking German! And
> although there may some day be a gender-balanced army which tolerates
> soft drug use, encourages other ranks to say "Fuck you, Sir!" to
> officers, and enforces sexual activity among its recruits, this seems
> as unlikely now as it must have done in 1975.
>
As someone who read the book when it was serialized in Analog in the
early 70s, I would have to disagree with you. The portrayal that
Haldeman gave to the military in the late 90s was at most an
exaggeration, and arguably an extrapolation of where things might have
gone from where we were at the time. Drug use was commonplace in the
U.S. military in the early 70s, and disrespect for the officers by the
enlisted men was also endemic. I would venture to guess that Haldeman
was drawing on his personal experience in Vietnam for these portrayals.
The only thing that was really changed in his book was that these things
were officially sanctioned, which didn't seem that outrageous a leap at
the time.
> The book's biggest problem is its handling of sexuality. In a year
> when Samuel R. Delany's _Dhalgren_, Joanna Russ's _The Female Man_,
> and Robert Silverberg's _The Stochastic Man_ were pushing the
> boundaries of the portrayal of sex in science fiction, _The Forever
> War_'s take on the issue seems rather unimaginative. The 1997 army
> enforces one-on-one heterosexual activity, with daily rotation of
> partners, among its personnel, none of whom appear to be particularly
> upset by this. A few decades later, the entire world has become
> homosexual as a means of population control, which seems rather
> disproportionate. Mandella sticks to his heterosexual guns, and does
> not appear in the least tempted to try it the other way (unlike the
> hero of Frederik Pohl's _Gateway_ which also won both Hugo and Nebula,
> two years later).
>
I don't really understand this criticism. You can't seem to make up your
mind whether you want to criticize the book for restricting the soldiers
in 1997 to heterosexuality, or because of the later postulation of
widespread homosexuality. It seems very credible to me that the military
might endorse heterosexuality promiscuity while neglecting homosexuality
(although I don't recall anything in the book to suggest that it was
actually forbidden, even in 1997). I also don't understand the criticism
of Mandella for not being tempted to try homosexuality. Is there some
reason why he needs to feel that way, in order to be considered a
well-rounded character? There are people in the world -- a great many of
them -- who are exclusively straight, remain so for their entire lives,
and are never tempted to cross that particular line.
I will also note that you are mistaken in asserting that the 1997
military mandated only one-on-one sex. There is one rather raucous orgy
fairly early in the book, which Mandella had to do his best to sleep
through, since he wasn't interested in participating. This orgy was
openly arranged and abetted by the commanding officer at the base where
it occurred, and there was no suggestion that it was contrary to military
regulation for him to have done this.
> And the ending, where our hero retrieves his lost love while the rest
> of the human race has surrendered its identity to a race of bisexual
> telepathic clones, seemed to me on first reading simply silly. I may
> be being unfair to the author here. Haldeman retorts in the
> introduction to "A Separate War", in the Robert Silverberg-edited
> collection _Far Horizons_, that:
>
> The Forever War does not have a happy ending. Marygay and
> William do get back together - the book ends with the
> birth announcement of their first child - but they're together on
> a prison planet, preserved as genetic curiosities in a
> universe where the human race has abandoned its humanity in
> a monstrous liaison with its former enemy.
>
> That's all very well as an explanation (twenty years on) of what was
> in the author's mind when he wrote it, but it doesn't really come
> across on the printed page of the book where the happy ending appears
> to be the point of the narrative. And it isn't sufficient, to this
> reader anyway, to justify the proliferation of homosexuality followed
> by the telepathic clones as a part of the metaphor for the alienation
> of Mandella from the rest of the human race; by today's standards this
> is either naive or offensive.
>
I found it neither naive nor offensive. Mandella came from an era when
the presumption was that most people were straight. He was never
socialized out of that attitude, and in fact had good reason to be
alienated from the homosexual majority that arises later in the book,
since they treated him with the same disrespect that most straights in
the 1970s treated homosexuals. This disrespect went so far as to cause
one of his subordinate officers to suggest that it was not safe for him
to mingle among the troops when they were armed for battle, because they
might kill him. There is plenty of material there to drive his
alienation, and the simple fact that after more than 1000 years humanity
had changed to the point of being unrecognizable, is also sufficient
cause.
--
In this house we obey the laws of thermodynamics! -- Homer Simpson
Del Cotter
Nicholas Whyte <nichol...@hotmail.com> said:
>_The Forever War_ by Joe Haldeman
>
>Review by Nicholas Whyte
>William Mandella is a physics graduate, drafted in the year 1997 to
>fight an interstellar war against the unknown Tauran enemy. Because
>the battlefields themselves are light-years away, Mandella spends most
>of the book slipping forward into the future thanks to time dilation,
>and thus becoming progressively more alienated from the society which
>he was recruited to serve. But
<spoiler for _ASH: A Secret History_ snipped>
That has got to be the most unnecessary spoiler of the year: I thought I
was reading a review of _The Forever War_, a book I read years ago.
Good review, but please be more careful to include spoiler warnings when
dropping references to other books next time.
--
. . . . Del Cotter d...@branta.demon.co.uk . . . .
JustRead:BujoldDiplomaticImmunity:NeilGaimanAmericanGods:GwynethJonesBol
dAsLove:KenMacLeodDarkLight:DamonKnightWhyDoBirds:JRRTolkienTheTwoTowers
ToRead:RobertCharlesWilsonBios:ChinaMievilleTheScar:ChristopherPriestFug
Del Cotter
Nicholas Whyte <nichol...@hotmail.com> said:
>However despite the undeniable power of the core message of the book,
>much of the packaging is flawed. The book begins in a world where
>interstellar space travel has been developed by 1997, which now seems
>optimistically premature to the 21st century reader. The first
>edition, which actually won the Hugo and Nebula awards, features a
>section set in a future Geneva where the UN is now based - a Geneva
>where the local population has suddenly started speaking German!
Haldeman is often weak on the details of European countries. In
_Worlds_ he has Britain using pounds, shillings and pence as a currency
two hundred years in the future. The book was written a decade after
decimalisation.
Nicholas Whyte
<d...@branta.demon.co.uk> wrote:
><spoiler for _ASH: A Secret History_ snipped>
>
>That has got to be the most unnecessary spoiler of the year:
Point taken. Sorry.
Nicholas
Walter Bushell
> On Fri, 10 Jan 2003, in rec.arts.sf.written,
> Nicholas Whyte <nichol...@hotmail.com> said:
>
> >However despite the undeniable power of the core message of the book,
> >much of the packaging is flawed. The book begins in a world where
> >interstellar space travel has been developed by 1997, which now seems
> >optimistically premature to the 21st century reader. The first
> >edition, which actually won the Hugo and Nebula awards, features a
> >section set in a future Geneva where the UN is now based - a Geneva
> >where the local population has suddenly started speaking German!
>
> Haldeman is often weak on the details of European countries. In
> _Worlds_ he has Britain using pounds, shillings and pence as a currency
> two hundred years in the future. The book was written a decade after
> decimalisation.
So, they reverted.
--
Sartre was an optimist. He thought Hell was _other_ people.
Walter
Matt Ruff
>
> The book's biggest problem is its handling of sexuality. In a year
> when Samuel R. Delany's _Dhalgren_, Joanna Russ's _The Female Man_,
> and Robert Silverberg's _The Stochastic Man_ were pushing the
> boundaries of the portrayal of sex in science fiction, _The Forever
> War_'s take on the issue seems rather unimaginative. The 1997 army
> enforces one-on-one heterosexual activity, with daily rotation of
> partners, among its personnel, none of whom appear to be particularly
> upset by this.
This is one of the elements that marks the book as late '60s/early '70s
SF -- the Future, in those days, included a whole lotta free love.
> A few decades later, the entire world has become
> homosexual as a means of population control, which seems rather
> disproportionate. Mandella sticks to his heterosexual guns, and does
> not appear in the least tempted to try it the other way (unlike the
> hero of Frederik Pohl's _Gateway_ which also won both Hugo and Nebula,
> two years later).
Of course he's not tempted -- the book is about how soldiers become
increasingly alienated from their home culture. If Mandella were
bisexual, the whole world turning gay in his absence wouldn't be nearly
as big a deal.
> And the ending, where our hero retrieves his lost love while the rest
> of the human race has surrendered its identity to a race of bisexual
> telepathic clones, seemed to me on first reading simply silly. I may
> be being unfair to the author here. Haldeman retorts in the
> introduction to "A Separate War", in the Robert Silverberg-edited
> collection _Far Horizons_, that:
>
> The Forever War does not have a happy ending. Marygay and
> William do get back together - the book ends with the
> birth announcement of their first child - but they're together on
> a prison planet, preserved as genetic curiosities in a
> universe where the human race has abandoned its humanity in
> a monstrous liaison with its former enemy.
>
> That's all very well as an explanation (twenty years on) of what was
> in the author's mind when he wrote it, but it doesn't really come
> across on the printed page of the book where the happy ending appears
> to be the point of the narrative.
I agree with you about this. The book really deserved an unequivocally
tragic ending -- it would have been much better to have Mandella come
home to find that Marygay had long since died of old age.
> And it isn't sufficient, to this
> reader anyway, to justify the proliferation of homosexuality followed
> by the telepathic clones as a part of the metaphor for the alienation
> of Mandella from the rest of the human race; by today's standards this
> is either naive or offensive.
How so? Even today, when homosexuality is much more widely accepted than
it was thirty years ago, coming out as gay can alienate you from large
segments of society. "The Forever War" simply turns the tables on that,
making the straight man the odd guy out. I thought it was, and is, a
very effective metaphor, tastefully executed.
-- M. Ruff
Del Cotter
Walter Bushell <pr...@panix.com> said:
>Del Cotter <d...@branta.demon.co.uk> wrote:
>> Nicholas Whyte <nichol...@hotmail.com> said:
>> >However despite the undeniable power of the core message of the book,
>> >much of the packaging is flawed. The book begins in a world where
>> >interstellar space travel has been developed by 1997, which now seems
>> >optimistically premature to the 21st century reader. The first
>> >edition, which actually won the Hugo and Nebula awards, features a
>> >section set in a future Geneva where the UN is now based - a Geneva
>> >where the local population has suddenly started speaking German!
>>
>> Haldeman is often weak on the details of European countries. In
>> _Worlds_ he has Britain using pounds, shillings and pence as a currency
>> two hundred years in the future. The book was written a decade after
>> decimalisation.
>
>So, they reverted.
Sure, and people in Geneva suddenly started speaking German. And a
Scottish character in the far future has to take a Welsh name because
his father married a Welsh woman, thus earning expulsion from the clan
[Maya Kaathryn Bohnhoff]. Or the legal system in Britain six centuries
in the future reverts to the seventeenth century [Bujold, _Brothers in
Arms_].
I sometimes think Americans believe Europeans are D&D characters, whose
stats can be fiddled with for laughs, instead of real people who do
things because they make sense. I sometimes think I'd like to see a
story in which Americans in 2040 behave like Americans in the nineteen
fifties, or the eighteen sixties, or the seventeen seventies, and airily
explain that "they reverted" with no further justification.
Never mind that it's rude, that's irrelevant to the question of written
science fiction: what it also is is lazy sloppy worldbuilding, and
that's a much more serious criticism.
Brandon Ray
Del Cotter wrote:
> Sure, and people in Geneva suddenly started speaking German. And a
> Scottish character in the far future has to take a Welsh name because
> his father married a Welsh woman, thus earning expulsion from the clan
> [Maya Kaathryn Bohnhoff]. Or the legal system in Britain six centuries
> in the future reverts to the seventeenth century [Bujold, _Brothers in
> Arms_].
>
> I sometimes think Americans believe Europeans are D&D characters, whose
> stats can be fiddled with for laughs, instead of real people who do
> things because they make sense. I sometimes think I'd like to see a
> story in which Americans in 2040 behave like Americans in the nineteen
> fifties, or the eighteen sixties, or the seventeen seventies, and airily
> explain that "they reverted" with no further justification.
Wouldn't bother me, if it resulted in an interesting story.
>
> Never mind that it's rude, that's irrelevant to the question of written
> science fiction: what it also is is lazy sloppy worldbuilding, and
> that's a much more serious criticism.
I think you need to get that chip off your shoulder.
Bill Snyder
<d...@branta.demon.co.uk> wrote:
>I sometimes think Americans believe Europeans are D&D characters, whose
>stats can be fiddled with for laughs, instead of real people who do
>things because they make sense. I sometimes think I'd like to see a
>story in which Americans in 2040 behave like Americans in the nineteen
>fifties, or the eighteen sixties, or the seventeen seventies, and airily
>explain that "they reverted" with no further justification.
*cough*JohnBrunner*cough*
--
Bill Snyder [This space unintentionally left blank.]
Jim Battista
>
>> I sometimes think Americans believe Europeans are D&D characters,
>> whose stats can be fiddled with for laughs, instead of real
>> people who do things because they make sense.
Europeans might well be real people who do things because they make
sense to them, but the examples you cited weren't examples of
Europeans.
They were, oddly enough, fictional characters (or settings), and those
in fact *are* D&D characters whose stats can be fiddled with for
laughs, and whose actions don't particularly have to make much sense.
You can make the *foo*th century UK an absolute monarchy or a
totalitarian offshoot of North America or a deep-Green sentimentalist
hellhole or a nanotech-driven communist anarchy or an uber-capitalist
freetown in a splintered land or a fairly placid mildly-deep-green
republic that's forgotten most high tech or you can make them all speak
French but call each other "Podner" and dress like teddy bears or
whatever the flying fuck it pleases you to do to it, just like you can
make sure that Delaware is/was nuked over its highway tolls in every
book you write or do anything to anybody or anywhere that it sets your
dark little heart atwitter so to do. You can do it because you think it
might happen, because it sets up a thermonuclear-level pun, because you
don't like the place, or whatever. It won't mean that you've written a
*good* book, but 90% of everything is, after all, crap.
--
Jim Battista
A noble spirit embiggens the smallest man.
Dan Tilque
> Or the
> legal system in Britain six centuries in the future reverts to
> the seventeenth century [Bujold, _Brothers in Arms_].
I guess I must have missed something, because I don't know what
you're refering to here. Please explain.
--
Dan Tilque
PS Miles & company reside about 1000 years in the future.
Matt Ruff
>
> I sometimes think Americans believe Europeans are D&D characters, whose
> stats can be fiddled with for laughs, instead of real people who do
> things because they make sense. I sometimes think I'd like to see a
> story in which Americans in 2040 behave like Americans in the nineteen
> fifties,
I suspect a lot of American SF from the 1950s might fit this bill...
-- M. Ruff
Johnny1A
Some people think that might not be quite as bizarrely improbable as
it sounds, if not taken too literally. There are those who have
argued that American attitudes and 'national mood' tend to be
cyclical.
Shermanlee
Mark 'Kamikaze' Hughes
> On Sat, 11 Jan 2003, in rec.arts.sf.written,
> Walter Bushell <pr...@panix.com> said:
>>Del Cotter <d...@branta.demon.co.uk> wrote:
>>> Haldeman is often weak on the details of European countries. In
>>> _Worlds_ he has Britain using pounds, shillings and pence as a currency
>>> two hundred years in the future. The book was written a decade after
>>> decimalisation.
>>So, they reverted.
> Sure, and people in Geneva suddenly started speaking German. And a
> I sometimes think Americans believe Europeans are D&D characters, whose
> stats can be fiddled with for laughs, instead of real people who do
> things because they make sense. I sometimes think I'd like to see a
> story in which Americans in 2040 behave like Americans in the nineteen
> fifties, or the eighteen sixties, or the seventeen seventies, and airily
> explain that "they reverted" with no further justification.
You mean like most SF that was written in the '50s, and often into the
'60s and '70s?
H. Beam Piper's the example that leaps to mind--the Terran Federation
is primarily based in Argentina, after the Northern Hemisphere is nuked
into a wasteland. Yet not a century later, they're acting like 1950s
Americans... AFAICT, it's not intended to be an anachronism, it's a
reasonable response to widespread affluence in a fairly conservative
society. He never overtly explained that, though.
And anyway, Europeans, Americans, Africans, Antarcticans, and small
fuzzy aliens from Alpha Centauri in stories *ARE* RPG characters who
live and die solely for the author's amusement.
Now be quiet, or we'll have Robert Charles Wilson swap out Europe with
a horrible alien landscape again.
--
<a href="http://kuoi.asui.uidaho.edu/~kamikaze/"> Mark Hughes </a>
"We remain convinced that this is the best defensive posture to adopt in
order to minimize casualties when the Great Old Ones return from beyond
the stars to eat our brains." -Charlie Stross, _The Concrete Jungle_
Steve Taylor
> Haldeman is often weak on the details of European countries. In
> _Worlds_ he has Britain using pounds, shillings and pence as a currency
> two hundred years in the future. The book was written a decade after
> decimalisation.
I just reread _Worlds_, an old Haldeman favourite, and found it much
weaker than I remembered. In particular the study trip around Europe
feels - despite being set in the future - as if Haldeman had just come
back from a 3 week european bus tour, and wanted to get some mileage out
of his diary.
> . . . . Del Cotter
Steve
Nicholas Whyte
wrote:
>Interesting review. I agree with most of it. A few comments, though:
Sorry to have delayed responding!
>> (And anyone who doubts that the military could possibly
>> jump at shadows to such an extent as to wage war against an enemy that
>> wasn't in fact an enemy should consider such recent events as the US
>> military's hysterical reaction to the International Criminal Court and
>> its bizarre fixation with National Missile Defense, a project that
>> will cost vast amounts of money to defend against a threat that is
>> vanishingly unlikely to transpire.)
>
>I agree that the military could be paranoid in this way, but I don't
>agree that these are good examples of it. First and foremost, both of
>these issues are being pushed largely by politicians, rather than by the
>military per se. Second, although some on the left like to dismiss such
>things out of hand, that's not really justified, based on the world we
>live in. At the very least, respectable arguments can be made for both
>positions.
I have to disagree, I'm afraid. It's seems fairly clear to me that
both the issues I specified, the ICC and NMD to use the standard
abbreviations, are indeed driven primarily by the US military; and I
have not been impressed by the arguments made on their behalf.
>Haldeman's tripwire that starts the war seems to be much more closely
>modeled on the Gulf of Tonkin incident, where a minor encounter (that may
>not even have happened at all) was blown up by the military and political
>establishment in the U.S. as justification for a major war.
Indeed; exactly my point.
>> although there may some day be a gender-balanced army which tolerates
>> soft drug use, encourages other ranks to say "Fuck you, Sir!" to
>> officers, and enforces sexual activity among its recruits, this seems
>> as unlikely now as it must have done in 1975.
>
>As someone who read the book when it was serialized in Analog in the
>early 70s, I would have to disagree with you. The portrayal that
>Haldeman gave to the military in the late 90s was at most an
>exaggeration, and arguably an extrapolation of where things might have
>gone from where we were at the time. Drug use was commonplace in the
>U.S. military in the early 70s, and disrespect for the officers by the
>enlisted men was also endemic. I would venture to guess that Haldeman
>was drawing on his personal experience in Vietnam for these portrayals.
>The only thing that was really changed in his book was that these things
>were officially sanctioned, which didn't seem that outrageous a leap at
>the time.
Realy? it seems to me a huge jump from a culture where drug use and
disrespect for the officers is universal but subversive, to one where
it is universal and officially sanctioned. Were officers in the 1970s
using, or thoguht to be using, soft drugs as well? (Apart from alcohol
of course.)
>> The book's biggest problem is its handling of sexuality. In a year
>> when Samuel R. Delany's _Dhalgren_, Joanna Russ's _The Female Man_,
>> and Robert Silverberg's _The Stochastic Man_ were pushing the
>> boundaries of the portrayal of sex in science fiction, _The Forever
>> War_'s take on the issue seems rather unimaginative. The 1997 army
>> enforces one-on-one heterosexual activity, with daily rotation of
>> partners, among its personnel, none of whom appear to be particularly
>> upset by this. A few decades later, the entire world has become
>> homosexual as a means of population control, which seems rather
>> disproportionate. Mandella sticks to his heterosexual guns, and does
>> not appear in the least tempted to try it the other way (unlike the
>> hero of Frederik Pohl's _Gateway_ which also won both Hugo and Nebula,
>> two years later).
>
>I don't really understand this criticism. You can't seem to make up your
>mind whether you want to criticize the book for restricting the soldiers
>in 1997 to heterosexuality, or because of the later postulation of
>widespread homosexuality.
Both. I don't think they are mutually exclusive!
>It seems very credible to me that the military
>might endorse heterosexuality promiscuity while neglecting homosexuality
>(although I don't recall anything in the book to suggest that it was
>actually forbidden, even in 1997).
The 1997 army is *enforcing* heterosexual promiscuity, not endorsing
it. None of the soldiers seems to feel that this is a gross invasion
of their privacy - "rape by government decree" as Justin Bacon put it
on a thread here a few years ago, and I think that's not an
exaggeration - if the army orders you to have sex then that is clearly
non-consensual. There's also no mention at that stage of homosexuals
among the recruits - in fact at a later point when they return from
their mission we are told that Mandella's group includes no
homosexuals at all. Given the numbers involved that seems unrealistic.
>I also don't understand the criticism
>of Mandella for not being tempted to try homosexuality. Is there some
>reason why he needs to feel that way, in order to be considered a
>well-rounded character? There are people in the world -- a great many of
>them -- who are exclusively straight, remain so for their entire lives,
>and are never tempted to cross that particular line.
Yes, but they live in cultures which are predominantly straight. In
ancient Greece, if we can believe Plato's Symposium, almost all men
were involved in same-sex relationships at some point. In a culture
where homosexuality is the norm I think most people would give it a
try, as indeed Marygay actually does in the follow-on story Haldeman
wrote for "Far Horizons", and I think the lack of exploration of
Mandella's motives for not doing so *does* make him a less interesting
character.
>I will also note that you are mistaken in asserting that the 1997
>military mandated only one-on-one sex.
I think it did, in the sense that one-on-one sex was the only form
explicitly mandated, while other activities were allowed though not
mandated.
>> And it isn't sufficient, to this
>> reader anyway, to justify the proliferation of homosexuality followed
>> by the telepathic clones as a part of the metaphor for the alienation
>> of Mandella from the rest of the human race; by today's standards this
>> is either naive or offensive.
>
>I found it neither naive nor offensive. Mandella came from an era when
>the presumption was that most people were straight. He was never
>socialized out of that attitude, and in fact had good reason to be
>alienated from the homosexual majority that arises later in the book,
>since they treated him with the same disrespect that most straights in
>the 1970s treated homosexuals. This disrespect went so far as to cause
>one of his subordinate officers to suggest that it was not safe for him
>to mingle among the troops when they were armed for battle, because they
>might kill him. There is plenty of material there to drive his
>alienation, and the simple fact that after more than 1000 years humanity
>had changed to the point of being unrecognizable, is also sufficient
>cause.
Two final points - actually before that, thanks again for your
thoughtful response to my piece.
First, I think the equation of homosexuality with the idea of humanity
transforming into a race of telepathic clones, as part of the metaphor
of alienation, *is* a little offensive. As far as I know, there are
plenty of homosexuals and no telepathic clones in human society today.
I suppose the thing is that I don't regard homosexuality as a
deviation but an alternative, and for that reason it seems strange to
me to equate it with the clearly non-human telepathic clones.
Second, of course the underlying portrayal remains a valid one, and
indeed a very moving story of a soldier who finds himself cut off from
the humanity he is nominally fighting for. All I can do is record why
it didn't quite work for me.
Nichoals
William December Starr
nichol...@hotmail.com said:
> William Mandella is a physics graduate, drafted in the year 1997
> to fight an interstellar war against the unknown Tauran enemy.
A stylistic note: when you're reviewing a non-recent novel that's set
in an time that was the future when it was written but now is the
present or past, it's probably a good idea to mention early on when
the book was first published, so the reader can get an idea of how
far into his future the author was looking. You didn't say "1975"
until much further down in the review.
-- William December Starr <wds...@panix.com>
Tom Scudder
> Now be quiet, or we'll have Robert Charles Wilson swap out Europe with
> a horrible alien landscape again.
God, was THAT ever a disappointing book.