Arnold
Tash Jayasinghe
CibbuanoThe Forever War
March 6th 2008 01:08
The Forever War is #1 on the Orion SF Masterworks series, and it earns its place on the list by being a rich novel, deep in social commentary and originality.
Written by Joe Halderman, it's taken to be a criticism of the author's own experience in Vietnam, where conscription forced unwilling participants to a war that many saw as needless.
The Forever War mimics those sentiments, but blows it up as the plot of a thousand-year space opera... Halderman dissects the warring society for all its worst qualities: high taxation, propaganda, tactics that treat infantry like pawns.
But above all of that, the most delightful aspect of Halderman's novel is the time travel.
In order to fight against the alien race, called Taurans, who are light-years away (much like Vietnam was across the ocean), the humans send their ships through wormholes, which means the ship travels much faster than the speed of light.
The crew stays in stasis while this is happening, but the relativistic speeds mean that when they return, hundreds of years have passed by on Earth, while the crew has only been gone for a few months.
And so, ironically, the main character, Mandella, who is not much of a soldier, fights in one campaign half-heartedly, then returns to Earth as a hero of the war, rich on paper because his wages have accrued massive interest.
Unfortunately, Earth has changed in the meantime... taxes are set at 90% to pay for the war, overpopulation has made employment exceedingly difficult, and the streets are filled with roaming thugs.
Mandella signs up for the army again, gets sent to one engagement, gets shot down immediately, wakes up in the infirmary and another few hundred years have rolled by.
Everyone he's ever known on Earth is gone. Furthermore, to combat overpopulation, the entire race is homosexual, relying on artificial means to have children.
Terrifying? Perhaps... but so wildly believable. Hundreds of years from now, what will the future be like? Will the Earth be overpopulated? Will countries use war as a way of deflecting human attention?
Are we going to greet aliens with missiles and laser beams?
While we don't have laser weapons yet, advances in science is making it more possible by the day.
Halderman's novel is a triumph of ingenuity, a riveting read that makes you cackle wickedly at what might be. This is what makes science fiction great.
We can only hope that they don't do a film adaptation. Unless, of course, I'm attached to direct.
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