Book Review: THE FOREVER WAR by Joe Haldeman

When "Military Science Fiction" grew up

Book Review: THE FOREVER WAR (1974) by Joe Haldeman

This novel can be read as a reply to Robert A. Heinlein's science fiction novel STARSHIP TROOPERS (1959), and also as an allegory for the Vietnam War.

Heinlein’s novel, about a future space war between humanity and an implacable alien enemy, practically gave birth to an entire subgenre of SF. Though immensely popular, STARSHIP TROOPERS has always been criticized for depicting war with a lack of realism. (After all, the author was an officer who never saw real combat.) Most of that book was really about the supposed virtues of military life outside of the actual fighting.

THE FOREVER WAR is narrated as the memoir of a soldier in an interstellar conflict with an alien civilization. But this novel was written by an actual veteran from the Vietnam War (which was still going on when the book was published) — so the story contains all the things that STARSHIP TROOPERS left out.

Here, the war between humans and aliens seems aimless and confused from the start. The soldiers are trained for ground combat on alien worlds that they know almost nothing about. The technology they rely on isn't always reliable; there are accidents and horrible injuries ... and the soldiers have good reason to hate their dishonest leadership rather than the "enemy."

Also, the strange circumstances of interstellar war increasingly alienate these soldiers from the “home front”. Without spoiling too much of the story, I’ll say that this part is heavy with bitter irony.

The level of gritty realism in THE FOREVER WAR is miles away from any gung-ho space opera. The reader feels as if this fictional memoir were real — a document from the future.

I strongly recommend THE FOREVER WAR.

The sequels were FOREVER PEACE (1997) and FOREVER FREE (1999).