The Forever War

Illustration by Steve Simmons

In a quick bite The Forever War by Joe Haldeman is the tale of one soldier who is caught in a thousand year interstellar war against a race called the Taurans while watching history, and everything he’s ever known, slip through his hands.  Said soldier is William Mandella who is originally born in 1975 and product of hippie parents. This tale takes the reader through an interesting tale which, at first, seems to be just another war book labeled under sci-fi because of its space aspects.  Little before half way through the book you’ve hedged your way through the technical space jargon and theory that you get to the grit of the plot. It’s here where he returns home after his first battle with the Taurans due to a battered ship with his newly found mate, Marygay Potter. What he finds isn’t open arms of the people he once knew but rather a much altered world where body guards things of normality, homosexuality runs popular whilst encouraged by the government and a food war is raging due to over population. This, I find, is a very easy feasible a future. Not only is our world currently pushing towards technology and globalization there is a decline in educational. Not to mention the world could be ruled by one political system or country that just decided to go bat-shit insane on the world but I doubt that it would be just in one life time. At least it wouldn’t be as established as what Mandella returns to.

After the shock of discovering his mother a bit of a lesbian herself he seeks his old war companion. Where we find that a type of guarded work camp system has been set up. It isn’t long before a shoot out happens where both Marygay’s parents die and both Mandella and she return back in the service. After new recruits and a few more time dilations Mandella finds himself once again encountering drastic future changes. This time he finds out that he is now a rare breed of heterosexual where the people of earth actually frown upon it and deem it a defect if you were. Somewhere along the lines he and Marygay are separated and Mandella goes on his final mission. After nearly surviving an attack by the Taurans he and his crew return back to the main hub where they once again notice times have changed once more. They are the last vessel to return from war which has now ended in a twist of almost comedy. The world is now dominated by clones and the war simply ended because both human clones and Tauran clones came together to decide they had no idea why they started in the first place other than an old administration craving war. Comically went their ways and ended the entire feud. Mandella receives a message from Marygay telling him she has been waiting on one of the few non clone based and heterosexual planets in a time capsule to keep her from aging too far beyond himself. He goes and finds her; they have a baby....

noooooooooooo

I personally enjoyed this book more for its theories of time dilation and comical ending than anything. Let’s face it, we’ve all either used or heard the phrase “well this wasn’t here when I was a kid” or “things were different then”  or even “back in my day.” You get to an age where you see visible differences in the small dwellings you live in, starting a small way; like homosexuals dominating the sexual preference board or in our case they put in a new Ihop, then eventually escalates to something giant like clones now predominantly owning the world and colonizing others or once again they moved the barber shop over two blocks. We all experience this floating feeling as we get older.

I also heavily enjoyed that everything that he had worked and fought for was almost entirely for nothing. Not even money for booze and cheap microwave dinners to drown away the war time sorrows. I realize that this was mostly in reaction to the Vietnam War but it’s also comical that he could have been just as or even happier if he had just stayed and worked out his days on earth. Yes he may have not found this century old love, Marygay, but hell he could have found another and possibly not have the traumatic events that he seems unphased by.