Book Report – The Forever War

I took two bundles of exam scripts home last weekend but didn’t even take it out of the backpack. It was what I should have been doing; the deadline for results submission is next Friday, April 24. Instead, I spent the weekend reading The Forever War.

The Forever War by Joe Haldeman is more than just a science fiction classic. Quoting William Gibson on this latest edition’s front cover, “[t]o say that The Forever War is the best science fiction war novel ever written is to damn it with faint praise”. The novel was first published in 1974, and swept the Nebula, Locus, and Hugo Awards for Best Novel in 1975-76.

The Forever War is often described as Vietnam War in space. The title refers to a 1,143-year war (!) fought by humans against an alien race referred to as Taurans. Due to time dilation from interstellar travel near the speed of light, the soldiers experience the war in months and years in “subjective time” while decades and centuries pass in actual “objective time”. So veterans return home to a world different from the one they left. Among other things, homosexuality is encouraged and later sanctioned, as a means of population control. The only connections the veterans have with the past are each other. In the end, the war turns out to be a huge mistake, just like the one in Ender’s Game.

So that’s one more item crossed out from my list of must-read classics. Now I am reading Neil Gaiman’s The Graveyard Book, which should take no time at all to finish if I have the time. In the meantime, even the sight of Anathem, sitting on my desk awaiting its turn to be read, is intimidating. The book is 935 pages thick!