Summer Reading Book Review #3: The Forever War

I will admit I am not all that much of a science fiction fan (more into fantasy literature) but Joe Haldeman's The Forever War was a wonderful read. Originally a collection of stories in 1972-1973, "The Forever War" was first published in book form in 1974 and has stood well the test of time. While one can see obvious references to the Vietnam War the journey of William Mandella (who explains that his name is even more strange when spell correctly) fits well into our current state of affairs. Young man, reasonably intelligent, is conscripted and serves a tour of duty against an enemy that is not understood (truly alien) returns home to find Earth so changed that he cannot function in "modern" society (which is interesting since a good part of the story covers the current real time year, 2007), returns to service, is injured, tries to retire but is brought back one final time. Each time out he feels more and more removed from his "home" in such a way that the corp becomes the only place he seems to function. Yet this is not a spaceships and blasters kind of book (though there is some of that). First and foremost it is a story about people, in particular one William Mandella, someone who was in the corp at the start of the conflict and survives the 1143 year war. And that provides one of the most interesting twists in the story. As ships travel at near light speeds, time for the crew "flows" differently than for home world, so two months ship travel time can cause years to pass outside the relative field of the ship. Not only does this account for some of the time shift, but allows for situations such as finding the enemy has created much more advanced weapons than they had when the mission started (after all, for a global economy in military mode weapons advance quite rapidly). For me there were three rather emotional pivot points in the novel:

When Mandella is assigned to a different point from the love of his life, Marygay. I almost cried when I read Mendella's feelings of her departure. They were together at the beginning, both returned to earth decades after their mission to find it nearly unbearable. In Mandella's own words, "I wasn't just losing a lover. Marygay and I were each other's only link to real life, the Earth of the 1980s and '90s. Not the perverse grotesquerie we were supposedly fighting to preserve. When her shuttle took off it was like a casket rattling down into the grave."

Finding out the reason for the war (I'll leave that to you to find out).

Mandella's feelings about having survived over a thousand years and being alone, a relic (remember that time for him has flowed differently than for Marygay so her survival at this time is beyond the realm of the fantastic... but read the story).

If you like reading fantastic literature, especially one that lends itself to intelligent discussion, I highly recommend this book to you.