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    The Forever War
    The Forever War
    The Forever War
    Ebook372 pages6 hours

    The Forever War

    By Joe Haldeman and John Scalzi

    4/5

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    Winner of the Hugo and Nebula Awards: A futuristic masterpiece, “perhaps the most important war novel written since Vietnam” (Junot Díaz).
     
    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
    Release dateDec 2, 2014
    ISBN9781497692350
    Author

    Joe Haldeman

    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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    Reviews for The Forever War

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    • 4/5
      The Forever War by Joe Haldeman is one of those books that it seems like everyone is telling me I need to read and so I finally got around to it. I'm not entirely sure why it took me so long seeing as I've read and thoroughly enjoyed several of Haldeman's short stories and poetry. From what I can tell, there are actually several different versions of The Forever War available. The story was originally serialized in the Analog science fiction magazine in 1974 and was later collected as a novel in 1975, winning the 1976 Hugo, Nebula, Locus, and Ditmar awards. The first version of the novel was edited for length for some reason (the book is well under three hundred pages). In 1991 the book was republished with some of the missing content included (I believe this is the version that I read). All editions of The Forever War published after 1997 have been completely restored.William Mandella was a university physics student when he was conscripted by the United Nations Exploratory Force in the war against the Taurans. He is part of an elite group of highly educated soldiers, all with IQs of 150 or more and all in exceptional physical condition. The war last centuries but due to time dilation caused by traveling at close to the speed of light, William only experiences it as a few deplorable decades. Against all odds he repeatedly manages to survive the encounters with the Taurans and UNEF's own lethal training regimen. But while he and his fellow soldiers are off fighting in an interstellar war, human society is undergoing drastic changes. Eventually they no longer have a home where they are accepted to go back to.Apparently, The Forever War can be read as a commentary on the United States' participation in the Vietnam War, of which Haldeman was a veteran. Unfortunately I can't speak much to that--my high school history classes stalled out at the First World War. However, I can say that Haldeman has effectively conveyed the anger and despair of soldiers that are caught in a conflict that they want no part in and which everyone else is trying to ignore is happening. The Forever War is a science fiction story, but like all good science fiction it reveals just as much about current and past events as it does to future ones. And even the story was written in the 1970s, it is still relevant for the twenty-first century. But by using science fiction as a vehicle, Haldeman is able to get his point across, emphasizing certain aspects of the war experience, in a way that would otherwise have been unavailable to him.Perhaps as a result of it's serialization, parts of The Forever War feel slightly disjointed--almost as if the book is a collection of very closely related short stories rather than a single novel. (This may also have to do with the particular edition of the story I read.) However, this does not necessarily detract from the tale's overall effectiveness. One of Haldeman's strengths is that he pays attention to the little and big details that makes his world different without over-analyzing or over-explaining them. Although, he does occasionally choose to focus on things that seem relatively unimportant. Perhaps the thing I enjoyed most about The Forever War was Haldeman's exploration of time dilation and the alienation and culture shock people go through as society and technology continue to change without them. In general, I really enjoy Haldeman's science fiction and The Forever War is no exception.Experiments in Reading
    • 4/5
      The premise: William Mandella never wanted to be a part of a war, but he's there, training and fighting against an alien race all for the sake of protecting colonist's ships as well as the collapsars that allow those ships to travel great distances. War is no picnic, but as Mandella will find out, neither is his homecoming. My RatingGive It Away: while I feel it's a must-read (not a must-have, there's a difference!) for SF enthusiasts and writers, really, this isn't the kind of book that I'd read again and want around. It's just familiar ground for me, and that's not the book's fault; rather, it's that I'm a product of dozens of films, television shows, and books that've done the same thing, if not better in some regards (this happens to me every time I read something that's classic SF or Fantasy). Scalzi fans who haven't yet read Haldeman might get a kick out of this, but may feel in the end that Scalzi does it better (but that's me). I'll give credit where credit is due: the SF of this book was interesting, and I can see where this book has been the inspiration for countless things (I couldn't help but giggle every time I saw the phrase "Stargate 1"). Haldeman crafts an interesting alternative history and future, and the voice of the narrator makes this book a relative fast read. I wouldn't call this book action-packed though: despite the fact it's a book about war, we hear about things happening more than we actually experience them. The book's more telling than showing, but the stuff it does show is pretty solid. I'm glad I read this, and while I won't read anything else in this universe, I won't hesitate to give Haldeman's work another shot later.Review style: this one's going to be pretty easy to discuss in general terms. Plus, the book's so old that spoilers, in my mind, are a moot point. This is a stream-of-conscious review, but I keep plot-specific spoilers to a minimum. The full review, which has no spoilers of any consequence, may be found in my LJ. As always, comments and discussion are most welcome. :)REVIEW: Joe Haldeman's THE FOREVER WARHappy Reading!
    • 4/5
      Military science fiction isn't usually my thing; the appeal of this is in the surprisingly thoughtful explorations of cultural change, and the odd dissociation of the main character from the world he's theoretically defending. It is very much a Vietnam War book, as I was always told, but it manages to avoid being bogged down in the time in which it was written.
    • 2/5
      I remember when I read Haldeman's "The Forever War"; it was considered a critique of "Starship Troopers". I have heard an anecdote that Haldeman attended an event where he was going to be on a panel with Heinlein and was dreading the meeting, fearing Heinlein would take him to task. Instead, Heinlein thought Haldeman's book was a great read and take on that theme, much to Haldeman's relief. I don't think Heinlein thought "Troopers" was a bible for creating a utopia, but he was laying down some philosophical markers with it.It's nothing of the sort (an utopia that is).I already wrote a review of sorts of “Starship Troopers” per se. This a review of “The Forever War” using “Starship Troopers” as counterpoint.I've read through “Starship Troopers” a few times, and to clarify: technically in his vision of the future the world IS NOT ruled necessarily by military veterans; it is in fact a world where only people who served AT LEAST two years in service to the government: this service could be the military, it could be labor such as mining, it could be scientific test subjects, or any other service deemed significant by the government (which is democratic). Heck they even say in the book that a chance to serve is a RIGHT, so technically someone could roll into the recruitment office in a wheel chair with both lets missing, one hand and blind in one eye and as long as the person can understand his responsibilities, the government is required to come up with some kind of job for that person to do for two years, even licking envelopes at the post office!Also: the protagonist is even TOLD OUTRIGHT in officer training school that being a veteran DOES NOT make you smarter or more disciplined than non-veterans, it is established that they keep their system (which AGAIN IS NOT a military dictatorship but a highly centralized republic) simply because it works. The military dictatorships of Hitler and his cronies have NOTHING to do with the world of “Starship Troopers”, because they ARE NOT a dictatorship!It's kind of ironic that even knowing Heinlein's intention, I've always read “Starship Troopers” as an anti-utopia, as a picture of a fascist state, something to avoid and abhor.We should say that a history of military dictators debunks Heinlein's message is completely incorrect. Firstly in “Starship Troopers” they don't have the right to vote while they're in the service meaning even a long time general didn't have the right to control civilian society. There really is no comparison to a dictatorship because the problem with dictatorships isn't that individuals are innately evil but rather that it's an unbalanced and unchecked system. Also even though the book seems to push for military intervention and war it's important to remember that the governing body is made of individuals who understand the gravity of war and military engagement better than anyone else.As a guy who never did military service, I don't think Heinlein's ideas about public service were too far off. If you're invested in society, you're much more likely to take a keen interest in what politicians do. (That's definitely something to consider in America where less than half the population votes; the same happens in Portugal: in the last May Elections for the European Parliament around 70% didn’t vote; I know, I know, the weather was terrific as it usually is at this time of the year). I do have a beef with his notion that veterans as a whole would make a government brisk and orderly like a military organization. Those types of military organizations, despite desperate PR from the military worldwide say, do not exist. Only fake veterans and general officers believe they do.I might add that Heinlein never said in “Starship Troopers” that violence was the preferred way to resolve problems. He denounced a Pollyanna sentiment current then and now that "violence never solves anything." And cites historical fact to back to back it. Certainly as a Naval academy guy he was OK with it. But he never said he preferred it. Also, while the state in “Starship Troopers” was clearly authoritarian and militaristic. But it wasn't, near as I could tell, fascist. There was no dictator, Committee of Public Safety or God Emperor Figure to pledge allegiance too.I'll go to bat for Heinlein's book but not for Haldeman's. And I think MOST people who read it and analyzed it (ironically including the military) underestimate Heinlein as a writer and as a thinker. A good chunk of that book was written AS SATIRE. It intentionally goes past the point of reason and shows its failings time and again to demonstrate the absurdity of an absolutist position. The movie was actually a great representation of the book in that it made the cheesy militaristic propaganda satire even more apparent so a wider audience could "get it." And if people think the movie is being serious then...they need to have their head examined.I don't think, for example, that one has to be an "apologist" to feel he makes some valid points in Starship Troopers. And the political failings of militaristic dictatorships does NOTHING to subvert Heinlein's assertion that veterans can act from a point of view of service -- HE was talking about people who VOLUNTARILY placed themselves at the service of the state, NOT draftees who did NOT choose. Finally, why, oh why, would you use an image from that horrible movie version of “Starship Troopers”? The armor didn't look like that, the bugs didn't look like that, etc. I always appreciated Heinlein's logic even while recognizing it's practical limitations (people are not logical and when they are they are rarely happy about it) in the real world. He was writing fiction after all. Did he really intend these stories to be statements about the world around him or were they simply stories for their time?I see the parallels to the cold war (and even WWII) in “Starship Troopers” but really never considered that saying something like "Any breed which stops its own increase gets crowded out..." was at all the same as saying "Any group of anatomically and culturally similar people that stop their own increase...". For now at least, it seems morally OK (even right) to be a humanist and exercise our privilege over other animals and life on the planet. We make them our tools, playthings, and food without any regrets at all. If chimpanzees became powerful enough to be our enemies, would we really have any compunction against killing them? How long would it really take for us to see them as people? Then again the lines between species is oft blurred. Hardly anyone ever gets this right: In "Starship Troopers" military service is not the only way to get a vote. It's service of ANY sort, military or non-military. You volunteer to serve, and the state MUST accept your service, no matter what you are capable of, and you must accept the service offered once you have volunteered. You might be sent to do medical research, or might be sent to build infrastructure in the wilderness, or if you are healthy, young and they need soldiers at that moment, well, you probably will get sent to the military. But it isn't "serve in the military or you can't vote"!What about "The Forever War"? It pales in comparison. I like the concept but it sounds like it was an utter failure. Several of the concepts seemed neat to me. Like even the idea of a future where homosexuality is the norm; it would be interesting to see a straight character deal with that. But then to make the entire population into some halfhearted cliché.... It was this clichéd, and then to have a character undergo treatment to be straight in the end like it was some kind of happy ending didn't sit right with me at all. But the concepts were excellent. In a way that makes it even worse because it could have been great. It just didn't do it for me. I’ve got another bone to pick with the story; I will say it comes off as a little misogynistic as there's a law that states the female soldiers have to screw the men so that they can let off steam, but that's off-set by the fact that in terms of ability, intellect, and overall development the women are portrayed as equals to the men.
    • 5/5
      The Forever War by Joe Haldeman and narrated by George Wilson is a good old fashion sci-fi adventure! Space travel, aliens, action, battles, social changes, military intrigue, and a hint of romance! This book has it all in written expertly! I hung on every word! I loved this book! I read this in 1975 or about then and couldn't remember all the details only parts and that I enjoyed it. I wanted to revisit this now that I am older and wiser. Also to see what social changes time has come true from the book.The narrator was terrific! Perfect for this story!
    • 5/5
      Review from BadelyngeI've just reacquainted myself with Joe Haldeman's anti-war sci-fi classic The Forever War. First published in 1974 the book tells the story of William Mandella, one of the first conscripted troops to be trained and thrown at an alien race the expansionist human race has encountered unimaginable distances from Earth. After his first tour of duty, lasting two years, Mandella returns to Earth to a home that has advanced by a decade due to the relativistic nature of long distance space travel. The alienation and disconnection with the world he returns to echoes Haldeman's own experiences of returning home from his tours in Viet Nam. As more time passes, Mandella becomes more divorced from the human race as a whole, compounding the meaningless of conflict to preserve a race he no longer identifies with. It's all cleverly written, leading the reader to consider the nature of war and man's relation to it. He explodes the glorification of war and all its cliches one by one, bringing the act of war down to something mechanical with its human components as mere specialised cogs in the machine. The book won the Nebula, Hugo & Locus awards which is no mean feat considering the hot bed of sci-fi talent operating when The Forever War first appeared. Ridley Scott is said to be interested in bringing the book to the big screen.
    • 5/5
      This hard-scifi interstellar was written in the midst of a country immersed in the Vietnam War. It won the Hugo and Nebula awards in 1976. This is at least the 2nd or 3rd time I've read this book. This time on audio.The story centers on the United Nations Exploratory Force, the military arm of a united world as humanity pushes out into space. As they expand, they run into an unseen alien race and are forced into conflict. Mech-suits and lasers and nova bombs, typical fare. But then its not so typical, its not all about technology, they find as battles across the far flung universe progresses, its necessary to resort to ancient medieval weapons. War is war, but the interesting thing in this story is how Haldeman handles actually getting to war. They discover "collapsars" (effectively wormholes) that allow for near lightspeed travel capabilities. But its not as warping in Star Trek or hyperspace in Star Wars. There are consequences to the extreme distances. The first battle expedition takes 2 years of subjective time to the troops, but by the time they get back home, over 25 years has elapsed. As they go out on new campaigns the distances and time dilation's get larger, the extrapolations that Haldeman explores on how the culture and economy and peoples of Earth change during the intervening 10s and 100s of years between battles is what I find very interesting.One of my favorite books, highly recommend.10/10S: 7/9/17 - 7/22/17 (14 Days)
    • 2/5
      The Meh War.
    • 5/5
      A great scifi book.
    • 4/5
      Follows a soldier in a future war from private through major, a career that spans centuries due to all the stargate-jumping. A cool take on the idiocy of war (without at all being preachy) and the culture shock of living through so many social changes. Slightly dated, but still a good read.
    • 4/5
      "The Forever War" won both the Hugo and Nebula awards for best novel in 1976 and is considered a classic of science fiction. I read the expanded "definitive" version of the novel. It includes a novella within the middle of the book that was originally excised and published separately from the first novel. In the author's notes Haldeman states that this "definitive" version is the book as it was originally written. The novel was first serialized in Analog SF magazine and editor Ben Bova thought the middle was too downbeat, so Haldeman published the middle novella section titled "You Can Never Go Back" separately in Ted White's Amazing magazine. He wrote a different middle for Bova to serialized. When the novel was published in book form and won the awards it was essentially the serial version juiced up for an adult audience. The middle part never got reassembled until 1991. As near as I can tell, the changes add about 25% to the original novel. I had read the original novel so long ago that I could barely recall it.So, is this a good story? Yes it is. At first I didn't think I was going to like it very much - the majority of the characters were extremely sketchy. Something else was building however and I even got a few sense of wonder vibes - some pretty mind-boggling stuff in here - and I was sad well before the end. This is a "future shock" type of war novel - future war, and the soldiers who manage to survive come back to a country and world that is very different than the one they left. The book takes a strange social turn that seems odd from a modern perspective. And, despite the sadness, there is something that I will call a happy ending.
    • 3/5
      I think that if you are into military space stories this would be your thing however it really isn't mine. Can't really say I loved the story. There are plenty of good details about the equipment and what can go easily wrong in the most hostile environment you could possibly serve in.
    • 4/5
      published 1974, a science fiction of interstellar war with the Taurens, winner of the Nebula Award, Hugo and Locus. It is also on the npr-100 best SF. The main character is a physics student. He has been sent to war because the smartest are being sent. He does not want to be a soldier. The author wrote this in 1974 probably based on his own Vietnam experience. I was a young adult during this time and I think that the book really does reflect that war. The people going to war, not wanting to go, no one really knowing why they are fighting and when they get a chance to leave the war, they no longer fit in the world because everything has changed so much. As with many SF books, I was impressed how the author writing in the seventies pictures the world in the 21st Century and beyond. The author not only captured the feeling of going to war for a young person, fighting far from home and not fitting in the world anymore without being preachy, he also captures some of the changing aspects of the current culture. I give this book 4 stars. Quite a bit of sexual content. Some compare this book to Heinlein's Starship Troopers but besides being
    • 4/5
      Very good military sci-fi. Well written, but violent and fatalistic, so if you don't like that sort of thing, stay away. It felt like the writer understood war (and sure enough, he is a Vietnam vet). The cover has a number of very flattering quotes from well known writers. I think I might have liked it even more if they had not raised my expectations so high - but then again, the quotes were what got me interested in the first place.

      Update August 2016. I forgot I read this book checked it out again and started reading. Something seemed fishy but it took me awhile to figure out what had happened. Anyway, it was still pretty good the second time through. There was a little bit of weirdness about gender orientation but it did not bother me too much.
    • 4/5
      In the distant future (1997), the government conscripts the best and brightest young men and women to fight a SPACE WAR against mysterious aliens. Without knowing any of the publishing information about this book, you’d still be able to tell it was written by a Vietnam vet in the mid-70s. The government is preposterously Machiavellian, the military is utterly inept, and the war is completely arbitrary. Think of The Forever War as a less subtle, less funny, less meaningful sci-fi version of Catch-22.

      That being said, this novel is a good read. Though the basic plot is the same thing you see over and over again in militaristic science fiction, Haldeman adds a few elements to keep it interesting. The science, in particular, I found very engaging. In this universe, it turns out Einstein was completely right and time starts to do very strange things when objects travel near the speed of light. As a consequence, personnel on starships come back from their missions decades and decades after they first set out, even though it has only been a few months from their perspective. This also means that when the soldiers encounter an enemy, they have no way to tell what “time” those aliens come from; they could be from hundreds of years in the past and have antique weapons, or they can be from the future and possess unheard of technology.

      Haldeman uses relativity as a brilliant plot device to trace human and cultural evolution over the course of thousands of years. The protagonist is in a constant state of future shock because whenever he arrives back at base or Earth, what he finds is unrecognizable.

      I’m more than a little iffy about how Haldeman treats women and homosexuality in this text. They have a presence at least; hurray! Women are part of the military and no one seems to think this is exceptional or strange. Sexuality is out in the open and encouraged; also hurrah! For a while, I was very pleased. However, then Haldeman drops this bomb:

      “… then unleashed Stargate’s eighteen sex-starved men on our women, compliant and promiscuous by military custom (and law), but desiring nothing so much as sleep on solid ground.”

      Now, it is possible that Haldeman is trying to critique this policy, but I certainly could not find any evidence. He uses the protagonist as a mouthpiece to rail against all the injustices the government and military commits, and he says only positive things about this law. Therefore, it makes me wonder if Haldeman actually doesn’t see anything wrong with that arrangement.

      Secondly, after the protagonist returns from a long journey, he finds out that the government has conditioned (via suggestion) everyone into being homosexual in order to control population. There are some homophobic comments from the protagonist, but he eventually accepts them as essentially no different from himself. What I really objected to here is the implication that there is some “gay switch” that can easily be flipped on or off in people’s brains.

      But unfortunately these are things you have to deal with when reading books from the 70s.

      The prose in this book is terrible: really choppy writing and no style. Also, there are a ton of grammar errors and a bunch of just straight-up typos. I know I read a first edition, but COME ON.

      Overall, I still recommend this book. It is definitely part of science fiction canon and after reading it I can see this work has inspired many imitations.

      … this review got a lot longer than I meant it to be. OH WELL.

      4/5 misunderstood aliens
    • 2/5
      I always felt badly that I had never read this classic book, that I was somehow not really an SF fan because of it. Eventually, guilt or shame brought it to the top of my in-pile, and I dove in. Now part of me wishes I had simply left it there.The premise is that humanity of early 21st century is at war with a far-flung alien race. We’re not quite sure how it started, but it looks like they shot first. The only FTL is via some kind of wormhole, but there is plenty of slower-than-light travel to and from, and much of that travel is at relativistic speeds.So, rather than leaving it as a pure space-navy war, we decide we need some boots on the ground. So who do we recruit as our cannon-fodder? Only the best and brightest will do. So we skim off the cream of our intellectual crop and send them off to battle. If only their commanding officers were as smart.Which is leads me to the main complaint about this book. The people in charge were always extremely short-sighted and downright stupid. I recognize that to some extent this is a screed against the U.S. political/military leadership from the U.S.-Vietnam war, but it got really annoying as to just how stupid they were making these folks.How stupid? Well, they planned their training with the expectation that half of the trainees would be killed or permanently maimed during the training. They also sent them on missions over the years (in fact, centuries) where the expectation was an average of 66% casualties per mission. But it’s not like we were stuck in the jungles, trying not to kill too many civilians. Nope, we were fighting over deserted rocks. What part of orbital bombardment did they miss?And then there was the whole Malthusian situation back on Earth. I know there was a lot of concern about the rapid rise of population back in the 1970’s, but even growing up with that, I was never all that worried. The concern, as originally laid out by Thomas Malthus in the late 1700’s, was that our population would outstrip our food production, and that the only ways to combat this were draconian birth control of the less desirable or poorer populations or outright war and starvation to bring the population back down to a manageable level.Some of offshoots of this back on Earth during the Forever War were an economy based entirely on calories. Then there were some civil wars and lawlessness that brought the population down. And then we had enforced and universal homosexuality. Maybe it’s because I now live in a world where most demographers realize we are not headed towards a Malthusian catastrophe, but frankly, I found most of this to be ridiculous.Perhaps it’s unfair of me to lay these criticisms on Haldeman’s 1970’s book, but its repetitive message that our leaders are stupid and we are all doomed was very tiring. I prefer more optimistic futurists because instead of complaining about all the insurmountable problems facing us, they tend to propose the solutions that actually solve those problems.And my final complaint about the book was that the resolution of the war was very much deus ex machina. After centuries, humanity transformed into another form that was able to communicate with the warmongering aliens. No, we can’t explain to you how the communication works, but now that it does, everything is just fine. The war was a silly misunderstanding, and now everyone can live happily ever after. We thank you for your centuries of pointless sacrifice.About the only thing I did find worthwhile in the book was the realities of relativistic travel, of skipping forward into the future. Friends and family age and die. Technology and society march on in unexpected directions. The realities of life, death, and injury change from one trip to the next. That, at least, was interesting.But by and large, I did not enjoy the book.
    • 4/5
      Really good story with realistic characters in a hard sci-fi setting. Although this book gets high praise, I found it deserving of the accolades. Would definitely be interested in reading more of Haldeman's work.
    • 5/5
      I read this just before meeting Jack at Leprecon 38 in Phoenix. I was very impressed with his book and I'm sorry I am now just discovering one of the great SF writers of our time. What I like best about this book is the voice. The dialog is perfect. And while other authors have served time in the military, Haldeman seems to have translated his experiences in a way that makes his writing more authentic.Even though the book is somewhat dated, the lack of everyday technologies like cell phones, PDAs, and other digital devices do not cause a severe problem for the reader. This book tells a story about the reality of war, and the impact it has on mankind.A must read.
    • 4/5
      William Mandella is one of Earth’s elite, young, physically and mentally talented. He is drafted in 1997 into the UNEF, a military force sent to explore the depths of space. He is trained to use the weapons and technologies he will need to survive both the environment and alien assaults. The catch is this, interstellar travel is possible, but thanks to Einstein time is distorted for the adventurers. As Mandella ventures deeper and deeper into space, combating a growing Tauran threat, dozens of Gs of acceleration, limb regeneration, brainwashing, harrowing worlds of ice, and the latest weaponry scientists have to offer. His soldier training keeps him alive, by dulling his emotions, but nothing can prepare him for his temporal dilemma. He’s only been out on campaigns for about five years, but in reality many centuries have passed by on Earth. Suddenly he returns to Earth as an alien, alone on his own homeworld.It is quickly obvious that Haldeman is very well versed in Einstein’s theories of relativity, and his science is very well thought out; no detail too small to be covered. In fact, nearly every field from astrophysics to medicine seems to be hit right on the nail. It is unfortunate that the writing quality doesn’t stack up. Descriptions are lacking, leaving large voids for the imagination to fill in. Characters are half-convincing, where most effort was poured solely into Mandella, leaving him surrounded by weak personalities. The plot makes enough sense, given the science involved. Haldeman is aiming between Heinlein’s soldiers and Asimov’s thiotimaline, and pulls it off as well as a second-string sci-fi writer in the early seventies could do while living under the shadow of Clarke and Asimov. The Forever War is far from a heavy read; I cut through it in one day. The story is engaging, and makes the book hard to put down. I just wish he dwelled longer on his thoughts about the future of genetics and cloning, a real hot issue for our day.VERDICT: 6 / 10(written February 2002)
    • 5/5
      Listened to this on audio and loved it. It was more technically oriented than Scalzi's Old Man's War series, but the characters shared the same flavor. Can't wait to read another by Haldeman!
    • 5/5
      I read this book in 1980 and really liked it. It'd be interesting to see if I'd still like it as much now. I remember how the lead character, in his faster than light travel, ended up hundreds of years in the future of where he'd have been if he'd lived his life in the normal way. One way Haldeman shows his disconnect with the world he ends up in is the prevalence of same-sex love, which he has difficulty with. I wonder if this book would seem homophobic to a 2010 reader.
    • 3/5
      I'd like to give it four, because the book has that mind-popping aspect that makes for great sci-fi, but the focus on sexual mores of society (even if it never actually showed anything) bothered me....is that our society will ever focus on? Sex?

      Other than that, a great and interesting, thought provoking read.
    • 4/5
      While the focus of The Forever War seems to be the day-to-day life of a soldier in an interstellar war against a mysterious (yet oddly incompetent) foe, what's really striking about this book are the brief check-ins the protagonist Mandella has with human society. Because of the time dilation involved in high-speed travel, each time Mandella returns from a several-months-long campaign, Earth has aged several hundred years. Even after the first, shorter interval (the destination was closer), Mandella finds that human society has changed drastically and he cannot adapt. It's an interesting conundrum, and it really makes you think--if you were dropped randomly into some point in the future, how well could you adapt? Between the seemingly pointless war, the rigors of military life, and the lack of anything recognizable to come back home to, this was a bit of a difficult read, but Haldeman does manage to pull it all together into a satisfactory conclusion that leaves the reader at least a little at ease.
    • 3/5
      This is one of those books where I can't decide if I should base my star rating on the quality of the book or my enjoyment of it, which in this case turned out to be very different. It's not a bad book, but it's not my kind of book so I didn't really enjoy it. Too much military stuff. What I found interesting was the concept that space travel causes time dilation, so that a character who has traveled a long distance comes back to find that hundreds of years have passed. This is an interesting idea, but Haldeman didn't explore it as much as I would have liked. Although culture changes over the 500 years or so that the main character experiences, the military doesn't change much at all. I was unconvinced by how easily the main character could integrate into the various time periods he encountered.
    • 3/5
      An interesting tale of a millenial war and the soldier who participates in all of it thanks to relativity effects of space travel. Clear parallels to Vietnam and some clever ideas here. My main gripe is that the narrator and main character is the only person who feels at all real. Everyone else, even the woman who is supposed to be the love of his life, just feels like set dressing. But if plot and theme are important to you and you aren't bothered by a little bit of weakness in characterization, its an enjoyable read.
    • 4/5
      A very creative take on the nature of war and the nature of the pairing of technology and war. Contains a plot that is elusive in nature and a character that is fallible and human, a good interpreter of the world Haldeman creates. I cringed a bit at some of the gender philosophies, fearing they weren't as open-minded as I thought they would be, but in the end, I think Haldeman does interesting things with philosophy while playing with the left turns that history can make.
    • 3/5
      Some... surprising homophobia. Product of the time period, I guess, but I wasn't expecting it and it really soured the story for me. Other than that, a good parable about war and what it does to people. I'm not sure if I'll go for the sequels.
    • 5/5
      One of my top five sci-fi books of all time. Brilliantly plotted and by turns witty, sarcastic, wondrous and cynical, it was one of the first sci-fi books I'd read that "made sense" from a political perspective (hint: it's really about the Vietnam war).

      I've read it a dozen times since the early 80s, and plan to read it again.
    • 2/5
      If I were a guy, or younger, or at least less feminist inclined, I probably would have liked this book a lot more.

      The Forever War is incredibly dated. It's not just old ("old" sci fi, even with dates we have already lived through isn't necessarily dated), but feels dated and almost irrelevant.

      It is heavily influenced by the Vietnam War, which the author took part in, and it's almost the Vietnam War In Space. The war lasts forever, it was pointless, lots of good people and resources are wasted. In the end a "peace" is declared, but the war is never won, and you don't get the satisfaction of anyone "beating" anyone else.

      The main character, William Mandella, is drafted (along with many others) because he has a high IQ, into the military for training and to be shipped out to fight aliens which have attacked humans, and are seen as a threat.

      Due to time dilation effects, the war is sloppy and slow. It takes years for the military to get anywhere (and back home, and back out again), so Mandella ages normally while time flies by. After his first tour, he comes home to an Earth society drastically changed, only to re-enlist and get trapped into another tour. He again comes back to another time, a different society, and this cycle happens repeatedly. In the end, he gets a "happily ever after" ending, which I would have enjoyed more if the author had cut it shorter (his companion, who has been with him through all of these time dilation effects, has chosen to use spaceflight and relativistic effects to 'wait' for him to come back to her).

      Several things were very good about this book. While I'm too young for the Vietnam war, I grew up with family and around those that were involved, and many of the things/feelings/over-arching situations in the book rang true.

      Unfortunately, the author's bizarre focus on sexuality (and homosexuality) in particular were just odd and felt forced. While there is an interesting (and enlightened) take on the forces that society can place on what it considers "normative" behavior is awesome, the fact that he makes state sponsored rape A-OK doesn't sit well with me (women were required by law to give in to sexual advances, at least in the military).

      In the end, it's always good to read an award winning book, but I was thankful and happy it was relatively short and a quick read.
    • 5/5
      Great read, and v "Starship Troopers". Originally read as a serial in Analog magazine. Then purchased a copy, not the copy here. Something back in the 70s. Not here.

    Book preview

    The Forever War - Joe Haldeman

    ‘Man was born into barbarism, when killing his fellow man was a normal condition of existence. He became endowed with a conscience. And he has now reached the day when violence toward another human being must become as abhorrent as eating another’s flesh.’

    — Martin Luther King, Jr.

    Private

    Mandella

    1

    ‘Tonight we’re going to show you eight silent ways to kill a man.’ The guy who said that was a sergeant who didn’t look five years older than me. So if he’d ever killed a man in combat, silently or otherwise, he’d done it as an infant.

    I already knew eighty ways to kill people, but most of them were pretty noisy. I sat up straight in my chair and assumed a look of polite attention and fell asleep with my eyes open. So did most everybody else. We’d learned that they never scheduled anything important for these after-chop classes.

    The projector woke me up and I sat through a short tape showing the ‘eight silent ways.’ Some of the actors must have been brainwipes, since they were actually killed.

    After the tape a girl in the front row raised her hand. The sergeant nodded at her and she rose to parade rest. Not bad looking, but kind of chunky about the neck and shoulders. Everybody gets that way after carrying a heavy pack around for a couple of months.

    ‘Sir’ — we had to call sergeants ‘sir’ until graduation — ‘most of those methods, really, they looked … kind of silly.’

    ‘For instance?’

    ‘Like killing a man with a blow to the kidneys, from an entrenching tool. I mean, when would you actually have only an entrenching tool, and no gun or knife? And why not just bash him over the head with it?’

    ‘He might have a helmet on,’ he said reasonably.

    ‘Besides, Taurans probably don’t even have kidneys!’

    He shrugged. ‘Probably they don’t.’ This was 1997, and nobody had ever seen a Tauran; hadn’t even found any pieces of Taurans bigger than a scorched chromosome. ‘But their body chemistry is similar to ours, and we have to assume they’re similarly complex creatures. They must have weaknesses, vulnerable spots. You have to find out where they are.

    ‘That’s the important thing.’ He stabbed a finger at the screen. ‘Those eight convicts got caulked for your benefit because you’ve got to find out how to kill Taurans, and be able to do it whether you have a megawatt laser or an emery board.’

    She sat back down, not looking too convinced.

    ‘Any more questions?’ Nobody raised a hand.

    ‘OK. Tench-hut!’ We staggered upright and he looked at us expectantly.

    ‘Fuck you, sir,’ came the familiar tired chorus.

    ‘Louder!’

    ‘FUCK YOU, SIR!’ One of the army’s less-inspired morale devices.

    ‘That’s better. Don’t forget, pre-dawn maneuvers tomorrow. Chop at 0330, first formation, 0400. Anybody sacked after 0340 owes one stripe. Dismissed.’

    I zipped up my coverall and went across the snow to the lounge for a cup of soya and a joint. I’d always been able to get by on five or six hours of sleep, and this was the only time I could be by myself, out of the army for a while. Looked at the newsfax for a few minutes. Another ship got caulked, out by Aldebaran sector. That was four years ago. They were mounting a reprisal fleet, but it’ll take four years more for them to get out there. By then, the Taurans would have every portal planet sewed up tight.

    Back at the billet, everybody else was sacked and the main lights were out. The whole company’d been dragging ever since we got back from the two-week Lunar training. I dumped my clothes in the locker, checked the roster and found out I was in bunk 31. Goddammit, right under the heater.

    I slipped through the curtain as quietly as possible so as not to wake up the person next to me. Couldn’t see who it was, but I couldn’t have cared less. I slipped under the blanket.

    ‘You’re late, Mandella,’ a voice yawned. It was Rogers.

    ‘Sorry I woke you up,’ I whispered.

    ‘’Sallright.’ She snuggled over and clasped me spoon-fashion. She was warm and reasonably soft.

    I patted her hip in what I hoped was a brotherly fashion. ‘Night, Rogers.’

    ‘G’night, Stallion.’ She returned the gesture more pointedly.

    Why do you always get the tired ones when you’re ready and the randy ones when you’re tired? I bowed to the inevitable.

    2

    ‘Awright, let’s get some goddamn back inta that! Stringer team! Move it up — move your ass up!’

    A warm front had come in about midnight and the snow had turned to sleet. The permaplast stringer weighed five hundred pounds and was a bitch to handle, even when it wasn’t covered with ice. There were four of us, two at each end, carrying the plastic girder with frozen fingertips. Rogers was my partner.

    ‘Steel!’ the guy behind me yelled, meaning that he was losing his hold. It wasn’t steel, but it was heavy enough to break your foot. Everybody let go and hopped away. It splashed slush and mud all over us.

    ‘Goddammit, Petrov,’ Rogers said, ‘why didn’t you go out for the Red Cross or something? This fucken thing’s not that fucken heavy.’ Most of the girls were a little more circumspect in their speech. Rogers was a little butch.

    ‘Awright, get a fucken move on, stringers — epoxy team! Dog’em! Dog’em!’

    Our two epoxy people ran up, swinging their buckets. ‘Let’s go, Mandella. I’m freezin’ my balls off.’

    ‘Me, too,’ the girl said with more feeling than logic.

    ‘One — two — heave!’ We got the thing up again and staggered toward the bridge. It was about three-quarters completed. Looked as if the second platoon was going to beat us. I wouldn’t give a damn, but the platoon that got their bridge built first got to fly home. Four miles of muck for the rest of us, and no rest before chop.

    We got the stringer in place, dropped it with a clank, and fitted the static clamps that held it to the rise-beams. The female half of the epoxy team started slopping glue on it before we even had it secured. Her partner was waiting for the stringer on the other side. The floor team was waiting at the foot of the bridge, each one holding a piece of the light, stressed permaplast over his head like an umbrella. They were dry and clean. I wondered aloud what they had done to deserve it, and Rogers suggested a couple of colorful, but unlikely, possibilities.

    We were going back to stand by the next stringer when the field first (name of Dougelstein, but we called him ‘Awright’) blew a whistle and bellowed, ‘Awright, soldier boys and girls, ten minutes. Smoke’em if you got ’em.’ He reached into his pocket and turned on the control that heated our coveralls.

    Rogers and I sat down on our end of the stringer and I took out my weed box. I had lots of joints, but we were ordered not to smoke them until after night-chop. The only tobacco I had was a cigarro butt about three inches long. I lit it on the side of the box; it wasn’t too bad after the first couple of puffs. Rogers took a puff, just to be sociable, but made a face and gave it back.

    ‘Were you in school when you got drafted?’ she asked.

    ‘Yeah. Just got a degree in physics. Was going after a teacher’s certificate.’

    She nodded soberly. ‘I was in biology …’

    ‘Figures.’ I ducked a handful of slush. ‘How far?’

    ‘Six years, bachelor’s and technical.’ She slid her boot along the ground, turning up a ridge of mud and slush the consistency of freezing ice milk. ‘Why the fuck did this have to happen?’

    I shrugged. It didn’t call for an answer, least of all the answer that the UNEF kept giving us. Intellectual and physical elite of the planet, going out to guard humanity against the Tauran menace. Soyashit. It was all just a big experiment. See whether we could goad the Taurans into ground action.

    Awright blew the whistle two minutes early, as expected, but Rogers and I and the other two stringers got to sit for a minute while the epoxy and floor teams finished covering our stringer. It got cold fast, sitting there with our suits turned off, but we remained inactive on principle.

    There really wasn’t any sense in having us train in the cold. Typical army half-logic. Sure, it was going to be cold where we were going, but not ice-cold or snow-cold. Almost by definition, a portal planet remained within a degree or two of absolute zero all the time — since collapsars don’t shine — and the first chill you felt would mean that you were a dead man.

    Twelve years before, when I was ten years old, they had discovered the collapsar jump. Just fling an object at a collapsar with sufficient speed, and out it pops in some other part of the galaxy. It didn’t take long to figure out the formula that predicted where it would come out: it travels along the same ‘line’ (actually an Einsteinian geodesic) it would have followed if the collapsar hadn’t been in the way — until it reaches another collapsar field, whereupon it reappears, repelled with the same speed at which it approached the original collapsar. Travel time between the two collapsars … exactly zero.

    It made a lot of work for mathematical physicists, who had to redefine simultaneity, then tear down general relativity and build it back up again. And it made the politicians very happy, because now they could send a shipload of colonists to Fomalhaut for less than it had once cost to put a brace of men on the Moon. There were a lot of people the politicians would love to see on Fomalhaut, implementing a glorious adventure rather than stirring up trouble at home.

    The ships were always accompanied by an automated probe that followed a couple of million miles behind. We knew about the portal planets, little bits of flotsam that whirled around the collapsars; the purpose of the drone was to come back and tell us in the event that a ship had smacked into a portal planet at .999 of the speed of light.

    That particular catastrophe never happened, but one day a drone limped back alone. Its data were analyzed, and it turned out that the colonists’ ship had been pursued by another vessel and destroyed. This happened near Aldebaran, in the constellation Taurus, but since ‘Aldebaraniam’ is a little hard to handle, they named the enemy ‘Tauran.’

    Colonizing vessels thenceforth went out protected by an armed guard. Often the armed guard went out alone, and finally the Colonization Group got shortened to UNEF, United Nations Exploratory Force. Emphasis on the ‘force.’

    Then some bright lad in the General Assembly decided that we ought to field an army of footsoldiers to guard the portal planets of the nearer collapsars. This led to the Elite Conscription Act of 1996 and the most elitely conscripted army in the history of warfare.

    So here we were, fifty men and fifty women, with IQs over 150 and bodies of unusual health and strength, slogging elitely through the mud and slush of central Missouri, reflecting on the usefulness of our skill in building bridges on worlds where the only fluid is an occasional standing pool of liquid helium.

    3

    About a month later, we left for our final training exercise, maneuvers on the planet Charon. Though nearing perihelion, it was still more than twice as far from the sun as Pluto.

    The troopship was a converted ‘cattlewagon’ made to carry two hundred colonists and assorted bushes and beasts. Don’t think it was roomy, though, just because there were half that many of us. Most of the excess space was taken up with extra reaction mass and ordnance.

    The whole trip took three weeks, accelerating at two gees halfway, decelerating the other half. Our top speed, as we roared by the orbit of Pluto, was around one-twentieth of the speed of light — not quite enough for relativity to rear its complicated head.

    Three weeks of carrying around twice as much weight as normal … it’s no picnic. We did some cautious exercises three times a day and remained horizontal as much as possible. Still, we got several broken bones and serious dislocations. The men had to wear special supporters to keep from littering the floor with loose organs. It was almost impossible to sleep; nightmares of choking and being crushed, rolling over periodically to prevent blood pooling and bedsores. One girl got so fatigued that she almost slept through the experience of having a rib push out into the open air.

    I’d been in space several times before, so when we finally stopped decelerating and went into free fall, it was nothing but relief. But some people had never been out, except for our training on the Moon, and succumbed to the sudden vertigo and disorientation. The rest of us cleaned up after them, floating through the quarters with sponges and inspirators to suck up the globules of partly-digested ‘Concentrate, High-protein, Low-residue, Beef Flavor (Soya).’

    We had a good view of Charon, coming down from orbit. There wasn’t much to see, though. It was just a dim, off-white sphere with a few smudges on it. We landed about two hundred meters from the base. A pressurized crawler came out and mated with the ferry, so we didn’t have to suit up. We clanked and squeaked up to the main building, a featureless box of grayish plastic.

    Inside, the walls were the same drab color. The rest of the company was sitting at desks, chattering away. There was a seat next to Freeland.

    ‘Jeff — feeling better?’ He still looked a little pale.

    ‘If the gods had meant for man to survive in free fall, they would have given him a cast iron glottis.’ He sighed heavily. ‘A little better. Dying for a smoke.’

    ‘Yeah.’

    ‘You seemed to take it all right. Went up in school, didn’t you?’

    ‘Senior thesis in vacuum welding, yeah. Three weeks in Earth orbit.’ I sat back and reached for my weed box for the thousandth time. It still wasn’t there. The Life-Support Unit didn’t want to handle nicotine and THC.

    ‘Training was bad enough,’ Jeff groused, ‘but this shit—’

    ‘Tench-hut!’ We stood up in a raggedy-ass fashion, by twos and threes. The door opened and a full major came in. I stiffened a little. He was the highest-ranking officer I’d ever seen. He had a row of ribbons stitched into his coveralls, including a purple strip meaning he’d been wounded in combat, fighting in the old American army. Must have been that Indochina thing, but it had fizzled out before I was born. He didn’t look that old.

    ‘Sit, sit.’ He made a patting motion with his hand. Then he put his hands on his hips and scanned the company, a small smile on his face. ‘Welcome to Charon. You picked a lovely day to land, the temperature outside is a summery eight point one five degrees Absolute. We expect little change for the next two centuries or so.’ Some of them laughed halfheartedly.

    ‘Best you enjoy the tropical climate here at Miami Base; enjoy it while you came. We’re on the center of sunside here, and most of your training will be on darkside. Over there, the temperature stays a chilly two point zero eight.

    ‘You might as well regard all the training you got on Earth and the Moon as just an elementary exercise, designed to give you a fair chance of surviving Charon. You’ll have to go through your whole repertory here: tools, weapons, maneuvers. And you’ll find that, at these temperatures, tools don’t work the way they should; weapons don’t want to fire. And people move v-e-r-y cautiously.’

    He studied the clipboard in his hand. ‘Right now, you have forty-nine women and forty-eight men. Two deaths on Earth, on psychiatric release. Having read an outline of your training program, I’m frankly surprised that so many of you pulled through.

    ‘But you might as well know that I won’t be displeased if as few as fifty of you, half, graduate from this final phase. And the only way not to graduate is to die. Here. The only way anybody gets back to Earth — including me — is after a combat tour.

    ‘You will complete your training in one month. From here you will go to Stargate collapsar, half a light year away. You will stay at the settlement on Stargate 1, the largest portal planet, until replacements arrive. Hopefully, that will be no more than a month; another group is due here as soon as you leave.

    ‘When you leave Stargate, you will go to some strategically important collapsar, set up a military base there, and fight the enemy, if attacked. Otherwise, you will maintain the base until further orders.

    ‘The last two weeks of your training will consist of constructing exactly that kind of a base, on darkside. There you will be totally isolated from Miami Base: no communication, no medical evacuation, no resupply. Sometime before the two weeks are up, your defense facilities will be evaluated in an attack by guided drones. They will be armed.’

    They had spent all that money on us just to kill us in training?

    ‘All of the permanent personnel here on Charon are combat veterans. Thus, all of us are forty to fifty years of age. But I think we can keep up with you. Two of us will be with you at all times and will accompany you at least as far as Stargate. They are Captain Sherman Stott, your company commander, and Sergeant Octavio Cortez, your first sergeant. Gentlemen?’

    Two men in the front row stood easily and turned to face us. Captain Stott was a little smaller than the major, but cut from the same mold: face hard and smooth as porcelain, cynical half-smile, a precise centimeter of beard framing a large chin, looking thirty at the most. He wore a large, gunpowder-type pistol on his hip.

    Sergeant Cortez was another story, a horror story. His head was shaved and the wrong shape, flattened out on one side, where a large piece of skull had obviously been taken out. His face was very dark and seamed with wrinkles and scars. Half his left ear was missing, and his eyes were as expressive as buttons on a machine. He had a moustache-and-beard combination that looked like a skinny white caterpillar taking a lap around his mouth. On anybody else, his schoolboy smile might look pleasant, but he was about the ugliest, meanest-looking creature I’d ever seen. Still, if you didn’t look at his head and considered the lower six feet or so, he could have posed as the ‘after’ advertisement for a body-building spa. Neither Stott nor Cortez wore any ribbons. Cortez had a small pocket-laser suspended in a magnetic rig, sideways, under his left armpit. It had wooden grips that were worn smooth.

    ‘Now, before I turn you over to the tender mercies of these two gentlemen, let me caution you again:

    ‘Two months ago there was not a living soul on this planet, just some leftover equipment from the expedition of 1991. A working force of forty-five men struggled for a month to erect this base. Twenty-four of them, more than half, died in the construction of it. This is the most dangerous planet men have ever tried to live on, but the places you’ll be going will be this bad and worse. Your cadre will try to keep you alive for the next month. Listen to them … and follow their example; all of them have survived here much longer than you’ll have to. Captain?’ The captain stood up as the major went out the door.

    ‘Tench-hut!’ The last syllable was like an explosion and we all jerked to our feet.

    ‘Now I’m only gonna say this once so you better listen,’ he growled. ‘We are in a combat situation here, and in a combat situation there is only one penalty for disobedience or insubordination.’ He jerked the pistol from his hip and held it by the barrel, like a club. ‘This is an Army model 1911 automatic pistol, caliber .45, and it is a primitive but effective weapon. The Sergeant and I are authorized to use our weapons to kill to enforce discipline. Don’t make us do it because we will. We will.’ He put the pistol back. The holster snap made a loud crack in the dead quiet.

    ‘Sergeant Cortez and I between us have killed more people than are sitting in this room. Both of us fought in Vietnam on the American side and both of us joined the United Nations International Guard more than ten years ago. I took a break in grade from major for the privilege of commanding this company, and First Sergeant Cortez took a break from sub-major, because we are both combat soldiers and this is the first combat situation since 1987.

    ‘Keep in mind what I’ve said while the First Sergeant instructs you more specifically in what your duties will be under this command. Take over, Sergeant.’ He turned on his heel and strode out of the room. The expression on his face hadn’t changed one millimeter during the whole harangue.

    The First Sergeant moved like a heavy machine with lots of ball bearings. When the door hissed shut, he swiveled ponderously to face us and said, ‘At ease, siddown,’ in a surprisingly gentle voice. He sat on a table in the front of the room. It creaked, but held.

    ‘Now the captain talks scary and I look scary, but we both mean well. You’ll be working pretty closely with me, so you better get used to this thing I’ve got hanging in front of my brain. You probably won’t see the captain much, except on maneuvers.’

    He touched the flat part of his head. ‘And speaking of brains, I still have just about all of mine, in spite of Chinese efforts to the contrary. All of us old vets who mustered into UNEF had to pass the same criteria that got you drafted by the Elite Conscription Act. So I suspect all of you are smart and tough — but just keep in mind that the captain and I are smart and tough and experienced.’

    He flipped through the roster without really looking at it. ‘Now, as the captain said, there’ll be only one kind of disciplinary action on maneuvers. Capital punishment. But normally we won’t have to kill you for disobeying; Charon’ll save us the trouble.

    ‘Back in the billeting area, it’ll be another story. We don’t much care what you do inside. Grab ass all day and fuck all night, makes no difference … But once you suit up and go outside, you’ve gotta have discipline that would shame a Centurian. There will be situations where one stupid act could kill us all.

    ‘Anyhow, the first thing we’ve gotta do is get you fitted to your fighting suits. The armorer’s waiting at your billet; he’ll take you one at a time. Let’s go.’

    4

    ‘Now I know you got lectured back on Earth on what a fighting suit can do.’ The armorer was a small man, partially bald, with no insignia of rank on his coveralls. Sergeant Cortez had told us to call him ‘sir,’ since he was a lieutenant.

    ‘But I’d like to reinforce a couple of points, maybe add some things your instructors Earthside weren’t clear about or couldn’t know. Your First Sergeant was kind enough to consent to being my visual aid. Sergeant?’

    Cortez slipped out of his coveralls and came up to the little raised platform where a fighting suit was standing, popped open like a man-shaped clam. He backed into it and slipped his arms into the rigid sleeves. There was a click and the thing swung shut with a sigh. It was bright green with CORTEZ stenciled in white letters on the helmet.

    ‘Camouflage, Sergeant.’ The green faded to white, then dirty gray. ‘This is good camouflage for Charon and most of your portal planets,’ said Cortez, as if from a deep well. ‘But there are several other combinations available.’ The gray dappled and brightened to a combination of greens and browns: ‘Jungle.’ Then smoothed out to a hard light ochre: ‘Desert.’ Dark brown, darker, to a deep flat black: ‘Night or space.’

    ‘Very good, Sergeant. To my knowledge, this is the only feature of the suit that was perfected after your training. The control is around your left wrist and is admittedly awkward. But once you find the right combination, it’s easy to lock in.

    ‘Now, you didn’t get much in-suit training Earthside. We didn’t want you to get used to using the thing in a friendly environment. The fighting suit is the deadliest personal weapon ever built, and with no weapon is it easier for the user to kill himself through carelessness. Turn around, Sergeant.’

    ‘Case in point.’ He tapped a large square protuberance between the shoulders. ‘Exhaust fins. As you know, the suit tries to keep you at a comfortable temperature no matter what the weather’s like outside. The material of the suit is as near to a perfect insulator as we could get, consistent with mechanical demands. Therefore, these fins get hot — especially hot, compared to darkside temperatures — as they bleed off the body’s heat.

    ‘All you have to do is lean up against a boulder of frozen gas; there’s lots of it around. The gas will sublime off faster than it can escape from the fins; in escaping, it will push against the surrounding ice and fracture it … and in about one-hundredth of a second, you have the equivalent of a hand grenade going off right below your neck. You’ll never feel a thing.

    ‘Variations on this theme have killed eleven people in the past two months. And they were just building a bunch of huts.

    ‘I assume you know how easily the waldo capabilities can kill you or your companions. Anybody want to shake hands with the sergeant?’ He paused, then stepped over and clasped his glove. ‘He’s had lots of practice. Until you have, be extremely careful. You might scratch an itch and wind up breaking your back. Remember, semi-logarithmic response: two pounds’ pressure exerts five pounds’ force; three pounds’ gives ten; four pounds’, twenty-three; five pounds’, forty-seven. Most of you can muster up a grip of well

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