Product Description

Private William Mandella is a reluctant hero in an interstellar war against an unknowable and unconquerable alien enemy. But his greatest test will be when he returns home. Relativity means that for every few months' tour of duty centuries have passed on Earth, isolating the combatants ever more from the world for whose future they are fighting.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #196943 in Books
• Published on: 2006-08-01
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 288 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
"Today we're going to show you eight silent ways to kill a man." The first line of this 1974 sf war story still grabs hard: The Forever War, winner of both Hugo and Nebula awards, is a fine choice to launch Millennium's "SF Masterworks" series of classic reissues. Future soldier William Mandella's service in the interstellar "Forever War" chillingly echoes Vietnam, where Joe Haldeman was severely wounded and won the Purple Heart. Afterwards, many real-life veterans found themselves distanced and alienated from US society: thanks to starflight's time dislocations, Mandella returns from weeks or months of combat duty to an Earth which after centuries of change is no longer his home. Though armed with increasingly futuristic weaponry--laser fingers, nova bombs, stasis fields--the infantry still suffers the long agonising waits, the sudden flurry and horror of battle, the shock of loss in a futile war without glory or glamour. But there's still room for tenderness, and for a satisfying ending as the cruel equations of relativistic time finally work in Mandella's favour. Incidentally, this is the first full British edition. When The Forever War was serialised, the magazine editor vetoed one section; it was omitted from the 1974 novel and is now restored. Highly recommended. --David Langford

Review
"Reissued by Gollancz as one of 10 key SF texts, 'The Forever War' remains as hard-hitting as when it was first published in 1974. The anger of soldiers forced to fight an unwinnable war is as relevant as it ever was." (Jon Courtenay Grimwood THE GUARDIAN )

About the Author
Joe Haldeman was born in Oklahoma in 1943 and studied physics and astronomy before serving as a combat engineer in Vietnam, where he was severely wounded and won a Purple Heart. The Forever War was his first SF novel and it won both the Hugo and Nebula awards, a feat which The Forever Peace repeated. He is also the author of, among others, Mindbridge, All My Sins Remembered, Worlds, Worlds Apart and Worlds Enough and Time.

Customer Reviews

A journey through time and space....
I really, really enjoyed this story. This is intelligent sci-fi at its best. You'll certainly need to get your head around the concept of "time dilation"; but I'm sure most of you sci-fi fans will have no problem with this.
The book portrays the politics of war as we know it today, showing that little changes in the distant future, regardless of technological and social advances.
The main character - William Mandella - is thrown into a war with a distant enemy who he knows little about. However, traveling through "wormholes" in space to the next battlefield and then back to HQ posses many difficulties, with decades and centuries passing
in the time that a 6 months mission is completed. Technology on both sides advance, but one never knows who is furthest advanced at any given time in the far reaches of space....
Soldiers are expendable and the enemy must be destroyed at all costs, no questions asked... sounds familiar??.
Each tour of duty takes Mandella further into an increasingly dizzily future and further up the career ladder until the war's final conclusion.

All in all, a book worthy of the SF Masterworks series. A thought provoking and worthwhile sci-fi experience.

Stonking.
Get a hold of this book and start reading because it is pretty amazing. There's no doubting that this book deserves its No. 1 position on the Science Fiction Masterworks list. From the very outset this is a bit of a rock and rolling ride... training and fighting and loving and dying and accidents and confusion and changing attitudes and mind-boggling time dilations - all this and you still get characters that you care about... in the end, everyone is out of kilter a little bit and when you find out the ending you'll either be really happy or really sad. Happy as the people we've been following for the last couple of hundred turns are happy... or sad at the pretty terrible waste of time it all was in the end.

The epitome of great science fiction
After reading this remarkable book, I have to ask myself why I have never heard of Joe Haldeman before. This book won the Hugo and Nebula awards--and deservedly so--but I was not at all familiar with this author up to now. I have to say that this book is an incredible read. It's not exceedingly long, but it is packed full of all kinds of ideas and strikes me as quite visionary for the time in which it was written, which was the early 1970s. I am not as well-read in the sci-fi genre as I would like to be, but I must say that the future earth Haldeman describes is one quite unlike any I have read about or thought about myself. The very premise strikes me as singular if not unique, and the end result is a thoroughly enjoyable novel that far exceeds the fare of most science fiction offerings.

In the late twentieth century, Earth develops the ability to travel to distant parts of the galaxy through portals called collapsars; they soon come into contact with an alien race called the Taurans, and war breaks out between the two worlds. The protagonist, William Mandella, finds himself drafted into the intergalactic service under the provisions of the newly established Elite Conscription Act of 1996. Rather than retain the future scientists and leaders at home, this act works to form an intergalactic army of the world's best and brightest young men and women. The new recruits endure a grueling and sometimes fatal training regimen before shipping out to the planets of disputed galactic areas. The trip itself is dangerous, and the troops must secure themselves in protective chambers while they make the long journey to their destinations. Traveling at speeds close to that of light, a journey of several months equates to centuries back home on earth. The troops themselves are made up of both men and women, and a high degree of "confraternizing" goes on between the two sexes. Mandella bonds with one woman in particular, and a part of the story revolves around their attempts to stay together. Mandella is injured in combat, and he returns to an earth that has changed greatly: it is not safe to go anywhere without a bodyguard, homosexuality has become widespread in the culture of nine billion earthbound souls, jobs are incredibly complicated to secure, and Mandella cannot fit in. He reenlists in the service. After another injury and another disillusioning trip home, he goes back into the service as an instructor; almost immediately, though, he is given command of a new ship and sent to a star system 150,000 light years away. By this time, with hundreds more years having passed on earth, heterosexuality has essentially disappeared, and his young recruits are basically genetically engineered test-tube babies. The story of his final military action makes for a thrilling end of the story.

In the end, the author seems to express his own opinions about warfare, which it is certainly his prerogative to do, but the importance of the novel seems to lie mainly in the personality of Mandella and the author's portrayal of a drastically changed future earth society. This work was truly visionary. Hard science fiction elements include time travel (relative, of course) through collapsars (essentially black holes), a means by which humans can survive speeds close to the universal speed limit, and the military hardware of the future. The social context of the evolving story is the most striking part of the book to me, though. Malthusian population crises lead mankind to embrace (and at one point legislate) homosexuality. Mandella's heterosexuality is looked down upon and actually affects the morale of the troops under his command. The author also deals to some degree with cloning, which is certainly a timely topic, and delves into the political, economic, and social structures of his future earth. Mandella himself offers a case study in humanity. A reluctant warrior, he does what he has to do despite some ambivalence about the war itself, and he holds true to his personal beliefs and values in a world (several, actually) turned on its head. There is also a love story of sorts in the book, but it actually serves to heighten the importance of the protagonist's internal struggles with himself and with a world that becomes completely foreign to him. This is science fiction of the highest caliber and stands alongside the master works of authors more widely-recognized than Haldeman.