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The Forever War (The Forever War Series Book 1) Kindle Edition
| Joe Haldeman (Author) Find all the books, read about the author and more. See search results for this author |
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In this novel, a landmark of science fiction that began as an MFA thesis for the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and went on to become an award-winning classic—inspiring a play, a graphic novel, and most recently an in-development film—man has taken to the stars, and soldiers fighting the wars of the future return to Earth forever alienated from their home.
Conscripted into service for the United Nations Exploratory Force, a highly trained unit built for revenge, physics student William Mandella fights for his planet light years away against the alien force known as the Taurans. “Mandella’s attempt to survive and remain human in the face of an absurd, almost endless war is harrowing, hilarious, heartbreaking, and true,” says Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist Junot Díaz—and because of the relative passage of time when one travels at incredibly high speed, the Earth Mandella returns to after his two-year experience has progressed decades and is foreign to him in disturbing ways.
Based in part on the author’s experiences in Vietnam, The Forever War is regarded as one of the greatest military science fiction novels ever written, capturing the alienation that servicemen and women experience even now upon returning home from battle. It shines a light not only on the culture of the 1970s in which it was written, but also on our potential future. “To say that The Forever War is the best science fiction war novel ever written is to damn it with faint praise. It is . . . as fine and woundingly genuine a war story as any I’ve read” (William Gibson).
This ebook features an illustrated biography of Joe Haldeman including rare images from the author’s personal collection.
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherOpen Road Media Sci-Fi & Fantasy
- Publication dateDec 2 2014
- File size4649 KB
Product description
About the Author
A multiple winner of both the Hugo and Nebula Awards, Joe Haldeman is an ultimate household name in science fiction. A Vietnam veteran and Purple Heart recipient, since the original publication of The Forever War, Joe has maintined a continuous string of SF classics, and as a long-time Professor of Creative Writing at M.I.T., is widely acknowledged as a key mentor figure to many of this generation's top SF stars.
--This text refers to the paperback edition.Review
“To say that The Forever War is the best science fiction war novel ever written is to damn it with faint praise. It is, for all its techno-extrapolative brilliance, as fine and woundingly genuine a war story as any I've read.” ―William Gibson, author of Neuromancer, Spook Country
“There are a handful of moments when an American science fiction novel abruptly and seemingly effortlessly satisfied every possible expectation conveyed not only by the genre's ambitions, but of those of the whole literary landscape with which it was contemporary: Sturgeon's More Than Human, Dick's The Man In The High Castle, LeGuin's Dispossessed, Gibson's Neuromancer. The Forever War is one such book, and like those others still carries with it that air of recognition and possibility.” ―Jonathan Lethem, author of Gun With Occcasional Music, Fortress of Solitude
“Perhaps the most important war novel written since Vietnam . . . Haldeman, a veteran, is a flat-out visionary . . . and protagonist William Mandella's attempt to survive and remain human in the face of an absurd almost endless war is harrowing hilarious heartbreaking and true . . . like all the best works of literature THE FOREVER WAR takes you apart and then, before you can turn that last page, puts you back together: better, wiser, more human. Simply extraordinary.” ―Junot Diaz, Pulitzer Prize winning author of The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
“If there was a Fort Knox for Science Fiction writers, we'd have to lock Joe Haldeman up.” ―Stephen King, author of The Shining, The Dead Zone, The Stand
“The Forever War is not just a great Science Fiction novel, it's a great Vietnam war novel - and a great war novel, without qualification- that is also Science Fiction. A classic to grace either genre.” ―James Sallis, author of The Long Legged Fly, Drive, Cripple Creek
“FOREVER WAR is brilliant--one of the most influential war novels of our time. That it happens to be set in the future only broadens and enhances its message.” ―Greg Bear, author of Moving Mars, Eon, The Forge of God
“A parable whose lessons are needful learning once more.” ―John Scalzi, author of Old Man’s War, The Ghost Brigades, Zoe’s Tale
“I first read this twenty years ago and have never forgotten the wonder and fury it kindled at the time. Anyone who talks about the glory of war has obviously never read it. A beautifully detailed and intensely personal account of a conflict which lasts for over a thousand years, as told by one grunt who lives through it all. Only a writer as skillfull and knowledgeable as Haldeman could use war's dark glamour to lure the reader in and then deplou the sam fascination to show just what kind of effect this orchestrated barbarism can have on the human soul.” ―Peter F. Hamilton, author of Pandora’s Star, Judas Unchained, The Dreaming Void
“In a literature of ideas, The Forever War is a titan: a book filled with mind-bending ideas about relatavistic time-distortion and world-shaking ideas about the futility of war. In today's world, where we think declaring war on abstract nouns like TERROR is a winning strategy, we need THE FOREVER WAR.” ―Cory Doctorow, author of Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, Little Brother X
“It is to the Vietnam War what Catch-22 was to World War II, the definitive, bleakly comic satire.” ―Thomas M. Disch, author of Camp Concentration, 334
“The Forever War does what the very best science fiction does. It deals with extremes both societal and teleological; it places a frame around humankind's place in the universe to show us what is outside the frame; and it functions simultaneously at the literal and metaphorical level. Inarguably one of the genre's great novels, it is also among the finest novels ever written about war.” ―James Sallis, author of The Long Legged Fly, Drive, Cripple Creek
--This text refers to the paperback edition.From Amazon
Product details
- ASIN : B00PI184XG
- Publisher : Open Road Media Sci-Fi & Fantasy (Dec 2 2014)
- Language : English
- File size : 4649 KB
- Text-to-Speech : Enabled
- Enhanced typesetting : Enabled
- X-Ray : Enabled
- Word Wise : Enabled
- Print length : 292 pages
- Best Sellers Rank: #60,729 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- Customer Reviews:
About the author

Joe Haldeman began his writing career while he was still in the army. Drafted in 1967, he fought in the Central Highlands of Vietnam as a combat engineer with the Fourth Division. He was awarded several medals, including a Purple Heart. Haldeman sold his first story in 1969 and has since written over two dozen novels and five collections of short stories and poetry. He has won the Nebula and Hugo Awards for his novels, novellas, poems, and short stories, as well as the John W. Campbell Memorial Award, the Locus Award, the Rhysling Award, the World Fantasy Award, and the James Tiptree, Jr. Award. His works include The Forever War, Forever Peace, Camouflage, 1968, the Worlds saga, and the Marsbound series. Haldeman recently retired after many years as an associate professor in the Department of Writing and Humanistic Studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He and his wife, Gay, live in Florida, where he also paints, plays the guitar, rides his bicycle, and studies the skies with his telescope.
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Human-kind’s thousand year war with the Taurans described in the book is a real attempt to describe the social, technological and even evolutionary effects of time dilation on the human experience, during the worst kind of experience, an interstellar war. The war changes Earth’s society and culture completely, and Haldeman shows this clearly. The story’s main protagonist, Mandela, becomes the longest serving soldier in Earth’s history, surviving hundreds of years (Earth time). Yet, because of time dilation as ships move by ‘collapsars’ across vast expanses that include to other galaxies, he ages only decades, and fights in relatively few campaigns after being wounded and recovering. The changes he sees in humans every time he returns from combat - caused by hundreds of years passing in his absence - render him, and Maryjane, the one other person of his generation still fighting with him, completely alone socially. When Maryjane is assigned to another strike group on their next tour, both know that time dilation means they will never see each other again. Sent on command of a task force, Mandela finds himself the ultimate outcast: his troops are uniformly homosexual by mandate, birthed from artificial wombs, and forced to learn his antiquated form of English. I found this the perfect expression of generation gapping, curiously a societal issue that only became really prevalent in the 1970’s when this novel was written.
The story is tight, well written and honestly portrays the ambivalent experience of any soldier caught in a larger conflict. The combat sequences are awesome, sufficiently technical without bogging down in futuristic technicalities. .
Really, one of my favourite books of all time.
Counterpoint
Anniversary Project
The Mazel Tov Revolution
To Howar Hughes: A modest proposal
A Mind of His Own
All The Universe In a Mason Jar
and so on... 15 short stories NOT "The Forever War"
And no way to return it, nice.
A parable of the author's Vietnam experience, pre, post and everything inbetween - this novel inserts you into the future and an increasingly disconnected protagonist with the society he is tasked to defend.
This novel is a very personal experience of war worth the quick read. Accessible, personable, and vivid, the reader will quickly find themselves immersed in the future with an easy to relate pathos situated squarely in the present.
Enjoy.
This novel is the first book in the SF Masterworks imprint series (in publication order). This is the novel, along with Heinlein's classic Starship Troopers, that invented the space marine. If you look around you can see its influence in so many works of sci-fi that it's become a trope: Halo, Warhammer 40000, Old Man's War by John Scalzi. It's also hard sci-fi that deals with time dilation effects from sublight interstellar travel and wormholes as a way to somewhat address the sublight limitation.
More than that, this is a war novel. It's a damn good war novel, written by a Vietnam war veteran, that ultimately speaks about his war experience.
I'm sure he must have been writing it as a form of therapy. It deals with war in a way only a soldier and a veteran can truly know. It covers the injustice of the draft, the horror of killing, the impersonal compassionateless nature of the military, dehumanization, PTSD, loneliness and isolation, the terror of being caught up in an experience so much bigger and more terrible than you, the danger and invasiveness of war technology, survivor's guilt, and alienation from the culture a soldier leaves behind. The space marine trope character is often tough as nails and devoid of human weakness. Haldeman's space marines are anything but.
It was powerful, gripping, horrible, funny, disturbing, sad and poignant.
The edition I read contains an introduction from John Scalzi and an intro by the author, who said this was the definitive edition. Haldeman wrote that he had difficulty getting the book published because no one wanted to read a war novel in the immediate wake of Vietnam; a non sci-fi publisher expanded into sci-fi and that's how it got done. And it won the Hugo and the Nebula. I see why.
He said that even so, he had to cut a novella portion from the middle because "it was too depressing," according to his publisher. That portion was restored for this book. Normally I'm not a fan of restoring cut bits to award-winning novels; I can't imagine this one without it. I think the book would have really missed something if he hadn't included it, so hopefully you can find that edition.
I borrowed a copy from my public library to read as part of the Science Fiction Masterworks book club (which you can find as a group on Goodreads, a Facebook group, and a reading challenge on Worlds Without End; join us!) I finished it yesterday, and by that time I'd already ordered a copy from Amazon, knowing I would read it again and again; which arrived today.
Go out and get a copy. Read it. You'll thank me for it.
Top reviews from other countries
And there is …. The story soon changes, the effects of time dilation as a result of near light speed travel are explored, as is the tragedy of one soldiers of loss of friends and family, alienation with humanity, not being able to fit into society plus having to deal with a seemingly endless pointless conflict.
The heart of the novel is about one reluctant soldier, Private William Mandella who is fairly ambivalent about the wars he finds himself in. He fights more from of a sense of duty and loyalty. The reader is subjected to a mixture of hard sci-fi: the aforementioned time travel and its effects, black holes and hi-tech arsenals along with descriptions of the social and political changes needed following on from a Malthusian-like catastrophe (population growth had outpaced agricultural production): homosexuality becomes the law (sex is treated by Haldeman in a non-judgemental and non-moralistic manner) and payment for work is in calories as opposed to actual money. The story also deals with love too. Mandella bonds with one woman in his company in particular and she provides his only connection to their known world of the past; as the book closes Mandella has travelled over twelve centuries.
It is clear that the book is an allegory to the Vietnam War, Joe Haldeman having served in this conflict. Other hints of the autobiographical nature of the work are the protagonist’s surname, Mandella, which is a near-anagram of the author’s surname, as well as the name of the lead female character, Marygay Potter, which is nearly identical to Haldeman’s wife’s maiden name. Importantly, if one accepts this reading of the book, the alienation experienced by the soldiers on returning to Earth becomes a clear metaphor for the reception given to US troops returning to America from Vietnam, including the way in which the war ultimately proved useless and its result meaningless. This meaningless is discovered in the book by a cloned, collective species calling itself Man who can communicate with the Taurans and discovers the aliens were not responsible for an act that triggered the futile conflict that lasted for more than a thousand years.
Haldeman also subverts typical space opera clichés (such as the heroic soldier influencing battles through individual acts) and demonstrates how absurd many of the old clichés look to someone who had seen real combat duty. In fact the quantity of battles described is relatively small, as the other aspects of the story are explored more extensively.
The other thing I’m noticing as I read and review the so-called classics of different genres is that the best characters are never really truly evil, nor good. Each person is a mixture of both. This is certainly the case in The Forever War as the individuals are well rounded and fully fleshed-out.
So in summary, this is science fiction of the highest quality and is worthy of the Masterworks title. The pace of the plot never slackens and this help to draw the reader in while retaining a compensate and emotional core (despite the battle sequences and death and destruction); a difficult balance to achieve. Despite it being over 40 years old a lot of the ideas Haldeman presciently foretells in the book are still relevant today and the years haven’t dated the story. A highly recommended book.
While this book has much in common with <i>Starship Troopers</i> there is much that differentiates it. The one thing that stands it apart from Heinlein's book is that <i>The Forever War</i> is unequivocally an anti-war book. Joe Haldeman draws on his experiences in Vietnam as the basis for this novel. This is also a science fiction novel and he adds a good dose of hard-SF to make it work.
Our hero, the narrator, is William Mandella. He finds himself thrust into a war he does not understand against the alien Taurans, which he understands even less. The enemy was first encountered in the Aldebaran system in the constellation of Taurus but the location of their native planet is unknown.
Superluminal travel exists in Haldeman's Universe. It is achieved by diving into an object called a collapsar. The trouble is travelling between these objects is done according to Einstein's physics. This can take a long time but time dilation can shorten the length of the trip for the soldiers, subjectively. This makes collapsars strategically important as are the frozen worlds that orbit them.
Private Mandella begins his training on the fictional planet of Charon deep in the outer Solar System. The training is brutal, unforgiving and dehumanising. The female soldiers are expected to put out for the male ones. I suspect this was shocking even in the nineteen seventies. Human beings are de-humanised and become assets to be used and expended in the protracted war.
More through luck than judgement, our hero survives his duty and he retires to civilian life on a now unfamiliar planet Earth. Unable to fit in, he re-enlists as a junior officer and is promoted again. Alas, the military separates him from his lady love. Relativistic time dilation means it is unlikely they will ever see each other again. Another layer of humanity is denied our protagonist
I found the battle scenes somewhat lacking. I felt like Haldeman was telling us about them rather than immersing us into the action and the danger. As an anti-war novel, I felt it failed to present to the Hell of war effectively. Having said that, Mandella has to cope with losing and nearly losing his colleagues, and indeed his own grievous injuries. We get a glimpse of the human cost of the forever war.
Re-reading on the Kindle it was just as engaging as Private Mandella manages to reach the heights of command simply by being just one of two people to survive 2000 years of war, the other is his lover of choice. Haldeman manages to avoid the cliches of war fiction, by leaving most of it out. Probably as a result of being a Vietnam veteran.
A Good read.
p.s. It's so like Starship Troopers - the book NOT the movie!





