The Forever War Haldeman

[Sanna Pospicil]

The Forever War is most famous for the way it deals with time dilation due to the near-light speed travel needed to wage an interstellar war. By the time Mandella has finished his two required years of subjective service, twenty-seven years have passed on Earth. He gets his first shore leave in 2023. His inability to reintegrate back into society has its obvious parallel, and thematically drives much of the story, along with his sardonic wit.

The collapsar Stargate was a perfect sphere about three kilometers in radius. It was suspended forever in a state of gravitational collapse that should have meant its surface was dropping toward its center at nearly the speed of light. Relativity propped it up, at least gave it the illusion of being there . . . the way all reality becomes illusory and observer-oriented when you study general relativity. Or Buddhism. Or get drafted.

I was rather surprised, though, at how little Haldeman and Mandella have to say about time dilation. As much or more time and brainpower is spent on power armor, healthcare (including a very creepy take on limb regeneration), and near-light speed travel. A hard science fiction fan will find a lot to like, or just someone who likes me who loves it for the worldbuilding. Haldeman has just as much to say about social science, especially when Manella returns to Earth in 2023.

For all that, The Forever War has aged very well. I read a couple other science fiction books this past month, both written in the 1950s. They feel like they were written in the 1950s. If you picked them up today, reading them would be a dissonant experience. The Forever War feels like it could have been written today, or in 1997.

Mandella, being the lusty, 1997 sort (Gen X! Gen X! Gen X!) thinks all this is a bunch of well cushioned fascism. Back in 1997 you could throw a Metallica cassette into your Walkman (or a CD into your Discman, if you were some kind of rich jackhole) and really be an individual, you know? Where can you be an individual in 2023? The moon.

He was twelve meters of flexible muscle with a razor-sharp tail at one end and a collection of arm-length fangs at the other. His eyes, big yellow globes, were set on stalks more than a meter out from his head. His mouth was so wide that, open, a man could comfortably stand in it. Make an impressive photo for his heirs.

I thought MY review was long. You really dissected this one. Apparently you felt like I did that long was the only way to do it justice. Maybe I should have taken another week to work on it. Great review. Thanks for the link.

Either way, it's too bad. As William Gibson notes in the blurb on the front of my paperback copy, "To say that The Forever War is the best science fiction war novel ever written is to damn it with faint praise." It's one of the best books about war, period, and it's telling that the other accolades listed come from literary lights like Jonathan Lethem and Junot Diaz, who calls it "perhaps the most important war novel written since Vietnam."

Haldeman is a thoughtful, generous interview; he's witty and funny, even when discussing grim prognostications of a violent future. In fact, when we begin our discussion in earnest, and I tell him his book has seemed to have proved prescient, that all signs seem to point to a perpetual state of forever war, he laughs.

Yet the frequency of smaller, but still-deadly bouts of lethal violence has changed. "That's the scary thing," he says. "There won't be another WW II, there won't be another major land war. But there will be lone actors with access to all sorts of technology. Science fiction has been imagining this scenario for three-quarters of a century."

"I don't think we've learned any fundamental thing about solving the problem. We've learned more about why people do seek violent solutions," he says. "That doesn't mean we have the social mechanism to address it." His words resonate, depressingly, when you consider that the US now averages one mass shooting per day, and that the trend is only accelerating upwards.

"We have people who just go down to the K-mart and just buy ammunition, and they could kill a few dozen people before we can do anything," he says. "[M]ore brute force is available to individuals, with no obvious improvement in the individual's ability to responsibly apply that force. Or decide not to use it." War, it seems, has been distributed.

Beyond that there are, well, situations like you see in North Korea, where massively destructive technologies are under the control of a small group of deluded or mentally unstable authoritarians. And that technology's only improving, too.

"A schizophrenic teenager can't wander in off the street and push the button that launches a nuclear weapon. But there are political processes in the world bizarre enough to put that schizophrenic teenager in a charge of a country with nuclear capability. If the world were a novel, the novel might be about all the people who are between that kid and that button, and what they do to prevent Armageddon. At the last minute, of course."

Haldeman wrote Forever War over the course of six years, during "a time when my life was changing pretty profoundly," he says. "I was living in a pretty turbulent time." When I ask him about his influences, and the best works of fiction that focus on war today, he gives the same answers: Stephen Crane's Red Badge of Courage, Tolstoy, John Dos Passos, and Joseph Heller's Catch-22.

"People say that I wrote Forever War in response to Starship Troopers, which isn't true," he says. "But it's one of the best didactic novels in science fiction. Though its didacticism works against it for the mature readers. I think if you were 16 years old and thinking about joining the army, and you read Starship Troopers, you might think 'I can't wait until I'm 18 to go out and kill some aliens."

Still, he's worried the news cycle won't keep PTSD in its sights for long. "The public seems to be pretty sympathetic to PTSD, but I do sense a weariness. Vets aren't news anymore. And the wars conventional soldiers fight seem less relevant as "the enemy" is more and more characterized as individual crazies acting out of personal hatred."

"I don't think the ending's happy at all," Haldeman says. "It's grim. They're going to carry on, but they're alone and lost." He adds that the publisher told him, after it was a bestseller, "we wouldn't have published it without a happy ending."

"I think the idea of an interstellar war is absolutely impossible, given the restrictions on space and distance," he says. "Even a planetary-sized conflict just requires too much energy and resources to be feasible." He thinks future space-conflicts will be resolved more amicably. "I think they'll be solved with diplomacy or just wither away. I guess 'withering away' is the nature of diplomacy sometimes," he says, laughing.

The Forever War is, thankfully, poised for a renaissance. Channing Tatum is leading the drive to get the book translated onto the big screen, picking up where Ridley Scott left off. The complicated, uneasy book is perfectly suited to the age of endless warfare, and what better way to start a genuine debate about the sensibilities of the perpetual war machine than to get Haldeman's ideas into the cineplexes.

"The idea of abolishing war has been with us for thousands and thousands of years," he adds. "I think we're more likely to invent the speed of light." But, if it happens, it will come about from abundance, from the end of violence over scarce resources.

"I guess I'm being reductive or simplistic by saying 'economic' reasons, if only because I can't see peace happening because people want to be reasonable or kind or admired," he tells me. "And of course peace itself doesn't happen; it's just the opposite, or obverse, of war happening."

"You might try to eliminate war by eliminating the conditions that cause it, like poverty and racial hatred and religious animosity. This is kind of la-la land, but it really may be the only stable long-term solution." It's what Haldeman calls "the inescapable tautology."

Unef's first starships had been possessed of a kind of spidery, delicate beauty. But with various technological improvements, structural strength became more important than conserving mass (one of the old ships would have folded up like an accordion if you'd tried a twenty-five-gee maneuver), and that was reflected in the design: stolid, heavy, functional-looking. The only decoration was the name MASARYK II, stenciled in dull blue letters across the obsidian hull.

Our shuttle drifted over the name on its way to the loading bay, and there was a crew of tiny men and women doing maintenance on the hull. With them as a reference, we could see that the letters were a good hundred meters tall. The ship was over a kilometer long (1036.5 meters, my latent memory said), and about a third that wide (319.4 meters).

That didn't mean there was going to be plenty of elbow-room. In its belly, the ship held six large tachyondrive fighters and fifty robot drones. The infantry was tucked off in a corner. War is the province of friction, Chuck von Clausewitz said; I had a feeling we were going to put him to the test.

"Jolly place, isn't it?" He idly punched up a general index on the library machine. "Lots of military theory." "That's good. Refresh our memories." "Sign up for officer training?" "Me? No. Orders." "At least you have an excuse." He slapped the on-off button and watched the green spot dwindle. "I signed up. They didn't tell me it'd feel like this." "Yeah." He wasn't talking about any subtle problem: burden of responsibility or anything. "They say it wears off, a little at a time." All of that information they force into you; a constant silent whispering.

"Ah, there you are." Hilleboe came through the door and exchanged greetings with us. She gave the room a quick survey, and it was obvious that the Spartan arrangements met with her approval. "Will you be wanting to address the company before we go into the acceleration tanks?" "No, I don't see why that would be . . . necessary." I almost said "desirable." The art of chastising subordinates is a delicate art. I could see that I'd have to keep reminding Hilleboe that she wasn't in charge.

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