The verdict
A short, furious, humane novel, and one of the very few war novels in the genre written by someone who had been there. The science fiction is simple and the argument is not. Read it for the time dilation and stay for what it says about leaving and coming home.
Quick facts
- Author
- Joe Haldeman
- First published
- 1974
- Publisher
- St. Martin's Press
- Series
- Standalone
- Awards
- Hugo, Nebula and Locus awards for best novel
- Best for
- Military science fiction that is about soldiers rather than hardware
- Skip it if
- You want a clear villain or an upbeat adventure
Author Joe Haldeman
The Forever War is Joe Haldeman’s 1974 novel about a soldier who fights a war that lasts a thousand years from the outside and a few years from where he is standing. Relativity does the damage: every time William Mandella’s unit travels to a battle, time on Earth races ahead. He comes home to a planet he no longer recognises, then goes out again. It is one of the best novels the genre has produced about what war does to the people who fight it.
The idea behind it
Haldeman was a Vietnam veteran, and the book is the science fiction that came out of that war. The enemy is never explained, the reasons for the war are never clear, and the soldiers are never told anything useful. What they are told is to go, and to come back, and the second part becomes harder every time.
The science fiction is what makes the argument sharp. Because faster-than-light travel does not exist in this future, interstellar war is fought by ships moving close to the speed of light, and time dilation means each tour costs the soldiers decades or centuries on Earth. Mandella signs up as a young man and returns, repeatedly, to a home that has moved on without him. The device is not a gimmick. It is the novel’s way of showing the thing that every soldier knows and no civilian really does: that the war goes on being normal while the world changes completely.
The story, spoiler-light
Mandella is drafted into the United Nations Expeditionary Force to fight the Taurans, an enemy humanity has decided is a threat. Training is brutal and deliberately so, and the book is honest about how much of military life is designed to make a person into a tool. Then the deployments begin, and the time gap begins to open.
Each return to Earth is a different world. The people are different, the politics are different, and eventually the society he left has changed so much that he is a stranger in it. What holds the book together is Mandella’s relationship with Marygay Potter, a fellow soldier, and the way the two of them keep being separated by a clock neither of them can argue with. The ending is stranger and more hopeful than the rest of the book suggests, and I will not spoil it.
What makes it science fiction
The relativistic premise is the science fiction idea, and it is used exactly as it should be: as a machine for generating loneliness. This is the book that made time dilation a standard tool for talking about war and estrangement, and its influence runs through the genre since.
Where it sits is at the head of the military science fiction tradition. Starship Troopers came first and is more interested in the soldier’s nobility; The Forever War came out of a real war and is more interested in the soldier’s damage. Reading the two together is the classic argument about what the subgenre is actually for.
Who should read it, and who should give it a miss
- Read it if you want military science fiction that is about soldiers rather than hardware.
- Read it if you like the idea of time dilation used as a device for grief and alienation.
- Read it if you want a classic that has not dated, because the war it is about has not ended.
- Give it a miss if you want a clear villain. There is not one, on purpose.
- Give it a miss if the period attitudes in the later sections will bother you. Some of them have not aged well.
- Give it a miss if you want an upbeat adventure. It is a book about returning home to nothing.
Where to start, and what to read next
Start here. It is a standalone novel in its original form, and the sequels, Forever Peace and Forever Free, came much later and are separate stories. Forever Peace won the Hugo award and is worth reading if you liked the ideas more than the war.
If you want the same subject handled differently, Starship Troopers is the optimistic answer and this is the weary one. For the modern version of the soldier’s problem, The Light Brigade by Kameron Hurley and Old Man’s War by John Scalzi are both in this book’s debt.
The verdict
A short, furious, humane novel, and one of the very few war novels in the genre that feels like it was written by someone who had been there. The science fiction is simple and the argument is not. Read it for the time dilation and stay for what it is actually saying about going away and coming back.
Frequently asked questions
Is The Forever War part of a series?
It stands alone. Haldeman returned to the world much later with Forever Peace (1997) and Forever Free (1999), but the original novel is complete on its own.
Did it win any awards?
Yes. It won the Hugo and Nebula awards for best novel, and the Locus Award, making it one of the most decorated science fiction novels of its decade.
Is it hard science fiction?
Partly. The time dilation is treated with real care, but the book is far more interested in what the physics does to a person than in the physics itself.
Where can I buy it?
It is available as a Kindle edition, and the buy links for Amazon.com and Amazon.in are on this page.