Originally published in 1974, Joe Haldeman’s The Forever War is simultaneously a book of its time and this time. (This is not an original observation. I’ll be the first to admit that. Doesn’t make it any less true, though.) It’s clear from even the first paragraphs that it was meant as a satire of the Vietnam War. But any time a country goes to war overseas for vague reasons, The Forever War becomes fresh again.
In the alternate history of this book, a war starts between Terrans in the mid-1990s with the first alien species they encounter. The United Nations Expeditionary Force quickly drafts the best and the brightest from around the world, sink a million dollars on each soldier’s training, and sends them off to meet the enemy. But because of the curious physics of interstellar travel in this universe, the soldiers experience only a few months or years of travel while back home Earth is experiencing decades and centuries. Periodically, our protagonist Mandella (his parents meant to name him Mandala but no one could spell it) gets news from home–but soon things on Earth start to sound more alien than the actual alien worlds he encounters.
The chronology of the novel unfolds over 1,100 years, but it’s a lightening fast read because Mandella spends so much time in stasis or being rebuilt from his last encounter with the enemy. His war really only lasts about a decade in his subjective experience. As Mandella hops across time, I was reminded more and more of H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine. In that novel, the protagonist jumps ever further in time. Before long, Earth is unrecognizable. Mandella finds that even after a decade or so in space (objective time, not subjective), he can no longer live on Earth. He can’t adjust to the society. The army is the only place that makes sense to him, just like prison makes sense to long-time prisoners.
To my mind, this is a direct analog of how hard it is for some returning veterans to adjust to a society that’s moved on in their absence. I can only imagine how much worse it is for veterans of wars like Vietnam or Iraq, ones where the reasons for going to war are murky, where veterans can’t count on public support because a portion of the civilian population thinks the war is a bad idea. In that way, The Forever War is a very sharp commentary on psychology and politics. I wonder why this book isn’t more widely read outside of the science fiction community. It should be up there with Slaughterhouse-Five and Catch-22.
Another thing that struck me about the book was the psychological manipulation the soldiers experience. It was disturbing to hear Mandella succumb to posthypnotic suggestions that cause him to kill every moving alien when he first encounters the enemy. The hypnosis those first troops had tried to turn them into berserkers. Even more disturbing is the conditioning that female soldiers get that makes them “open” to sex with their comrades in arms. As a female myself, that smacks of rape. This is alluded to only briefly by Mandella (a male character), which bothers me all the more.
This element isn’t enough to make me change my mind about how good the book is. It just means that I have to classify it as a guy’s book. It would have been very interesting if the main character had been female. But I have to remember that this book was written in 1974, by a guy. It’s almost in the ball park of having to forgive Mark Twain for using the n word in Huckleberry Finn.