R- The Forever War (v,slight x,b), Forever Peace (v,x,b-suicide), Forever Free (v,b)

Haldeman is well known as one of the great authors of military Science Fiction- twice the winner of both the Hugo and Nebula for the same novels, as well as several other awards. But when you start his books, they seem so simple, not at all the "Grand Master" style one expects from someone with such laurels. It is this very simplicity, this matter-of-fact, understated style, that lets the reader see clearly into his world. The horrors he describes, as well as the beauties, are just part of life as his characters know it- sometimes contemplated, often just accepted. The power of his work is in its sheer, immediate reality. Beware, though, that he doesn't force a happy ending if the story doesn't go that way.

Though he hasn't published a vast number of novels and doesn't cover a wide range of subgenres, Haldeman's quality is excellent. He tends to focus on war, especially the Vietnam war, and on the potential for alienation in the human condition. With novels, novellas, short stories, and poetry all published, he has a wide variety of mediums for various readers. Even I, an extreme pacifist, plan on collecting everything he's ever written- he's just that good. People who don't like science fiction may also enjoy some of his work, such as 1968, which is just about the Vietnam war and the war at home, no sci-fi included. He also gives a relatively large amount of "screen time" to women, integrating them into his stories without belittling them, a charming talent in a military writer.

Many, if not most, of Haldeman's books are out of print. Used bookstores and Amazon.com are your best bets.

The Forever War is simply darn good sci-fi. Imagine the Vietnam war in space- with all the attendant communication problems and time dilation. Sure, there are the equivalent of wormholes, but you still have to get to them. So war is like a chicken-fight underwater- terribly slow yet mostly incomprehensible, and still quite deadly. William Mandala is just an ordinary joe with an extraordinary talent- most people would call it luck. Yet all the luck and training in the world can't save him from the disruptions in his life cause by time dilation. After his first mission, he comes home to find his mother in her 80's- with him still in his 20's. Only one person ever means anything to him after hundreds of years; nothing else is certain, especially not life. The parallels between this story and Vietnam are striking, especially when Haldeman uses futuristic dilemmas to highlight and simplify our current problems. The violence is graphic, but not gratuitously so. William is just describing what he sees, nothing more. Even his descriptions of physics and engineering stop just shy of losing me and focus on the practical realities for the soldier. In all, I thought this was a brilliant book that illustrates the trouble good books have getting published in our industry, where name recognition often seems more important than originality. My recommendation: make sure you get the author's new, definitive version, without the middle parts hacked out and prettied up. Reality bites, but it's also more believable.

Here is a quote from page 43 of the 1998 edition, showcasing Haldeman's simplistic style: "The collapsar Stargate was a perfect sphere about three kilometers in radius. It was suspended forever in a state of gravitational collapse that should have meant its surface was dropping toward its center at nearly the speed of light. Relativity propped it up, at least gave it the illusion of being there... the way all reality becomes illusory and observer-oriented when you study general relativity. Or Buddhism. Or get drafted."

Forever Peace is a powerful novel sharing many of the same themes as The Forever War, but with different characters and settings. Julian is a mechanic, a soldier who controls a nearly-invincible soldier-boy machine from a distance. He was drafted to fight in a war he does not believe in, against the Ngumi alliance of third world nations. His is a world of plenty contrasted with despair, where everyone in America has the basics for survival yet remain desperately unhappy in a virtual police state, while the vast majority of the world has neither freedom nor plenty. Added to this dichotomy is the division between the jacked- those whose minds can be connected through machines- and the unjacked, a dividing line so strong that it threatens Julian's relationship with his lover Amelia. Both physicists, the lovers discover together that mankind's greatest scientific achievement, the Jupiter Project, may also be the last act of anyone in the universe.

The plot is convoluted and strongly interwoven, though it does not necessarily seem so at first because Julian is not personally aware of how the pieces fit together. The other narrator, the plural one, often intervenes to fill in the gaps in Julian's highly personalized, desperately sad tale of the beginning of a new human era. The guilt, anger, and suicidal feelings that Julian has emotionally parallel those of the whole human race as it learns to adjust its morality to its own technological capabilities. Though the story is often simplistic in style and ends somewhat abruptly, it is a truly beautiful and prophetic novel about the clash of basic human ideologies and our responsibilities to the rest of our race. If you love or hate war novels, pick up this one; it might just change the way you look at the world.

The third "forever" book is Forever Free, a plot sequel to The Forever War, combining thematic elements from its predecessor and from Forever Peace. A much older William Mandala, having raised two kids on the frozen iceball Middle Finger, decides that there is time in his life for one more adventure. He proposes to take a shuttle out of the galactic plane and back, spending some 20 years of his own life to see how the galaxy would change in 40,000 years. When he and his co-conspirators are denied permission by the clone-community known as Man, they hijack the ship anyway. Then the unexplainable begins: a storage locker leaks all its air- into nothing; the surface of a single handball court becomes sticky- even after resurfacing; and all the videos beginning with the letter C disappear. Finally, their antimatter power source itself disappears, leaving the would-be adventurers stranded. Is there a logical explanation for all of this, or have the humans passed the boundaries of logic itself? This novel is much older in perspective than the last two, and to some extent it is more bitter. On the other hand, it also seeks real answers, not just to political circumstances, but to why the world is the way it is. This is a scientist's search for God, an experiment to prove that the impossible is real, an attempt to know the unknowable. Purely in terms of writing, it is not as elegant as the first two, but in some respects it is more honest, and just as gut-wrenching. Be forewarned: just because there is no war, don't expect there to be no stomach-churning violence. I recommend reading both of the other books first, to give you an idea of the parameters of the experiment, so to speak.

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