Forever War

ForeverWar is a futuristic book by JoeHaldeman?. A good read about warfare conducted by humanoid robots guided by human operators and the psychological effects of the war on those operators. Equally good sequel http://bookshelved.org/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?ForeverPeace.

The author was a Vietnam vet and was thoroughly disgusted with war and the army, an attitude which shines through every single book he's ever written.

The actual title is, "The Forever War". The other book, "Forever Peace", was not a sequel but an alternate story line altogether. From the book: "This book is not a continuation of my 1975 novel The Forever War. From the author's point of view it is a kind of sequel, though, examining some of that novel's problems from an angle that didn't exist twenty years ago."

The "original" serialization of The Forever War (there have been a few versions of this story) had the main character telling his tale to a reporter. At the end of the news article there was a note that, because of longevity medicines and a bunch of other stuff the soldier had survived all 1200 years of the war. Heh.

"A bunch of other stuff"? You mean the #1 reason, relativistic effects?

Actually, I don't think it was relativistic travel that was the main contributor to the soldier's longevity in the original version (it definitely was in the book). The idea was that the war lasted 1200 years in real time and there were people who fought from begining to end. Oh, and the real reason for the war? Industrial tycoon types from both species got together and agreed that they needed to keep the war going so that their respective military/industrial complexes could prosper. In the book, the military/industrial complex of Earth instigates the war and the aliens simply have no means to stop it.

Was followed by a true sequel, the unmitigatingly abysmal "ForeverFree?" which contained not one but two DeusExMachina convolutions in the end. I believe the author wrote this book as an insult to all those who demanded a sequel. -- MartinZarate

CategoryBook, CategoryScienceFiction