Day 92: The Forever War

Well, this is a weird one, and I'm not really sure how I feel about this novel. In essence, the book is a Vietnam War allegory. There are a lot of deep issues covered during the course of the story, the trauma of war, the bureaucracy of the war machine, the burden of command, soldiers returning to a world they no longer recognize, and all of these things I very much like to see. Thing about them is, many of these themes feel a little heavy handed to me. It's supposed to evoke the same feelings that the soldiers in the war would have experienced and to do that effectively Haldeman takes a lot of bizarre creative license with the way the future plays out. His imagination is undeniably far reaching and powerful, but also full of blind spots that may only be obvious to someone living in the 21st century. The book is very much a product of its time, and it's supposed to be. I only mention this because it threw my suspension of disbelief more than a couple times. I'm happy to have read this award winning novel, and I can see why it received all the praise that it did, but I don't think it'll ever be on my personal favorites list.

That pretty much sums up my thoughts about the novel, but if you're interested in more detail, I summarize the novel below and go into some more depth. I'm going to try out this format because it lets me avoid spoilers. So yeah, spoilers!

William Mandela starts his life as a soldier in the 1990s, a time when humans have achieved interstellar travel. He's drafted as a part of an elite conscription act that targets the most intelligent and physically capable, another example of the allegorical themes in this novel. The brain drain of the Vietnam War is carried right on over into the war with the Taurans, aliens that are rarely seen throughout the course of the novel. William's bootcamp is brutal, and many fellow conscripts are killed during the tragically inapplicable training. After his first 'combat encounter' with the Taurans (a government mind-control induced massacre of what appear to be civilians), their ship is heavily damaged during a foray with an enemy vessel. They're forced to return to Earth early in the tour of duty.

Due to the nature of relativistic travel, decades have passed on Earth while only a couple of years passed from William's perspective. Haldeman's imagination shines here when showing the culture shock that William and his lover Marygay experience when they return to Earth. He finds a very different world, one with an economy supported by the war machine that drafted him, and more societal changes than I can list here. The crime is out of control, and most people rely on government assistance to survive. Jobs are regulated by the government, though black markets have risen up where illegal employment can be secured. To get a grip on the overpopulation problem, the government has been encouraging 'homolife,' and most young people only engage in homosexual relationships. The rampant lawlessness and homolife are off-putting to William and Marygay, but they decide to take a world tour with their massively inflated bank accounts (also due to the relativistic space travel), to get a sense of what Earth is like nowadays.

Their tour is abruptly ended after a violent encounter when William witnesses a woman being publicly raped and decides to intervene. They decide the world will be too much of a culture shock after this, and instead go to live with Marygay's parents on a farming commune in the Midwest. Violence follows them to the farm however, and Marygay's parents are killed by raiders stealing food. William's mother also dies due to lack of healthcare at the ripe age of 84, right after revealing she too had a homosexual relationship with a brief side character. Obviously, the soldiers have been away from home for far too long.

All this is too much for the pair so they decide to reenlist, on the condition that they be granted instructor assignments on the moon. Within about an hour the army rescinds this agreement, and forces them back into a combat tour. Both of them are wounded almost immediately without so much as even seeing a Tauran, and have to spend some time on the planet Heaven to recuperate.

Their next assignments separate them, with William receiving an extremely remote command. Relativism rears its ugly head again, and they realize that William will be much younger than Marygay the next time they meet, if ever.

After a long trip in a crowded spaceship, William leads a battle against the Taurans, and then returns to human space only to find the world has changed again. Human cloning has become not just legal, but the norm, and the collective planets colonized by humans call have united under the title of simply 'Man.' The war is over, William's recent battle being the last in the thousand year conflict. It's revealed that the whole thing was started over a misunderstanding. The Taurans weren't marauders destroying colony ships, and instead this was just an excuse used by those with an interest in starting a war. The missing colony ships were simple accidents. Now Man and the Taurans communicate freely and have a peaceful coexistence in the galaxy.

Marygay has been using intermittent space travel to extend her life in the hopes that she can be with William again. They meet and go to live on a 'old-style' heterosexual colony and live happily ever after. The End.

I mentioned there were a few times my suspension of disbelief was shattered while reading, and now that I've summarized, I think you can probably guess the parts of the novel where that happened. Earth being a complete wasteland full of violent criminals due to overpopulation isn't too much of a stretch in a world where interstellar travel was achieved in the 90s, but it was a little hard for me to take the extent of the degeneration in such a short time seriously. I mean, come on, 20 years and the whole world is either completely lawless or ruled by fanatically authoritarian governments? How messed up were the 70s for Haldeman to have this future rattling around in his head?!

Certainly the authoritarian government aggressively pushing homolife instead of just subsidizing contraceptives doesn't make much sense to me. On the one hand, its pretty prescient to see the wide acceptance of homosexuality coming in 1975, but he pretty much only uses it to alienate William from what he knows about the world. It also suggests that Haldeman has a misunderstanding about homosexuality in the first place. The simple fact is, not that many people are gay, and though he mentions a cure to heterosexuality, this isn't available for many centuries. Does he think people can choose who they're attracted to? I was confused about how this played out for most of the novel, because it's hard for me to figure how he imagines this happening. It's something like 2/3 of the population when he returns to Earth, and by the time he's on Heaven it's almost literally everybody. Again, this is within a couple generations. Are they genetically manipulating people to be gay or something? Later on, William has a conversation on the topic with one of his officers (also from the past) that muddied the waters even further for me:

O brave new world, I thought. ‘No birth trauma. A billion perfectly adjusted homosexuals.’

‘Perfectly adjusted by present-day Earth standards. You and I might find them a little odd.’

‘That’s an understatement.’ I drank off the rest of my beer. ‘Yourself, you, uh … are you homosexual?’

‘Oh, no,’ he said. I relaxed.

‘Actually, though, I’m not hetero anymore, either.’ He slapped his hip and it made an odd sound. ‘Got wounded and it turned out that I had a rare disorder of the lymphatic system, can’t regenerate. Nothing but metal and plastic from the waist down. To use your word, I’m a cyborg.’

Does ... does Haldeman think losing your bottom half makes you less attracted to people somehow? I don't understand. I get that the officer is an amputee, and maybe sex would be different for him, but what does that have to do with whether or not he wants to have it? Did he 'cure' himself of sexual desire after being wounded? Why would anybody do that? There are even brain stimulators used later in the novel that could easily simulate the sensation. This is never really explained very well and so I just sorta went with it. I think it was just to ladle on the sense of displacement for William. It makes the point that even those closest to being like him are different. Unfortunately it also just doesn't make that much sense, so it threw me off rather than make me feel closer to William.

I mentioned at the beginning that the themes were a little heavy handed, leading to my insuspension of disbelief, but I can understand why. The power of the novel lies in the allegorical nature, and you can't really pull that off without exaggerating a little, or a lot. With my complaints aired, I must say enjoyed most of the novel. There are some cool sci-fi concepts, some good action, and a lot of the social commentary is spot on. I think it has a lot to offer, but it got bogged down at times where it felt like Haldeman was trying a little too hard to make you feel out of place, so hard in fact that it just detached me from William instead of making me feel closer to him. Overall, I recommend this novel, though you might find some hiccups along the way if you're like me.

Thank you for reading,

Benjamin Hawley