Haldeman squeezes this set of circumstances for lots of pretty interesting chapters, many of which have to do with explaining a world a hundred or several hundred years in the future. So, soldiers go off to battle and come back decades or centuries later.

Martin’s Press in 1975, it swept every major SF Award, including the Hugo, Nebula, and Locus awards. Cover by Murray Tinkelman Joe Haldeman’s The Forever War is one of the most honored science fiction novels of all time. For journeys in areas where no collapsar is in the vicinity, travelers in Haldeman’s books move at some significant fraction of the speed of light. The Forever War (Ballantine Books, 1976). It is a brilliant, fearless work, not just about America’s wars after 9/11, but ultimately. Like no other book, The Forever War allows us a visceral understanding of today’s battlefields and of the experiences of the people on the ground, warriors and innocents alike. In The Forever War, Haldeman employs ‘collapsars’ the same way wormholes are employed in more modern fiction, as gates through which space travelers can jump from one area of the galaxy to another. A car bomb explodes, bullets fly, and a mother cradles her blinded son. The choice carries significant implications for the story that develops. What I mean by this is that one of the things authors have to consider when they sit down to write a space opera of any sort, is whether faster than light (FTL) travel occurs in their new universe. You also get a heaping helping of world-building, a world that needs to get built and rebuilt several times because the author chooses to tell his story in a hybrid FTL universe. The Forever War is a Vietnam War novel set in space, although Haldeman accepts that most of todays readers wont make the connection. The books use of mechanized armor and space flight in war was revolutionary and could influence someone to think along those lines and try to evolve those premises while trying to portray a vision of war that more closely aligned with the uncertainty of Vietnam as opposed to the righteousness of WWII possibly even to specifically refute the. That’s a pretty standard trope in many military stories before the hero(es) goes off to war. Well, you get a lengthy newbie soldier training sequence. So, what do you get instead of rock’em-sock’em war?

The forever war novel