Classic SF book review: "The Forever War" by Joe Haldeman
"The Forever War" by Joe Haldeman, was published in 1974 and I first read it as a child.
It is an absolutely iconic novel of what relativity might do to the lives of people who travel in space, especially if we ever had the disaster of an interstellar war, is one of the greatest science fiction novels of all time, and probably just about beats Ursula Le Guin's "The word for world is forest" as the greatest Science Fiction anti-war novel of all time.
(Original book cover art above was by Patrick Woodroffe)
The book is narrated by William Mandela, and at the start of the book, set in 1996, he is a private, called up to fight in a war which has just started against an alien race known as the "Taurans.".
In the author's preface to the Gollancz masterworks edition, written in 1997, Haldeman explained that he set the start of the story in 1996 so that it was just possible that some of the officers and senior non-commissioned officers at that stage of the book could be Vietnam veterans. Many aspects of the book draw on his experiences of the Vietnam war in which he served himself.
Because of the time dilation involved in travelling to distant stars, even with a means of side-stepping the constraints of Einsteinian physics for part of the journeys, Mandella and the other characters find every time they come back to Earth that they are further and further into a future in which their home planet has become increasingly unrecognisable. This is a metaphor for the way that veterans returning home to the society they have fought for often find they have difficulty fitting into that society.
As Mandella is lucky enough to survive successive campaigns he is also promoted to higher ranks in which he has less and less confidence in his ability to deal with the challenges of commanding a force hundreds of light years from home and a thousand years after everyone he loved has died.
More than fifty years after it was written this book has aged pretty well - as the author admitted in the introduction already referred to, the dates look a bit silly now as we all know an interstellar war didn't start in 1996, but the ideas, the characters, the situations in the book all still seem very real and relevant today.
I strongly recommend this book
You can order it from Amazon at
There are two other books which are considered to be part of the same series.
"Forever Peace" is a companion volume and is NOT really a sequel. It is not set in the same timeline as "The Forever War," with the action taking place on earth in 2043 rather than in space stretching to the far future, and explores some rather different ideas about technology might change war.
However, anyone who has been following the development of drone warfare in the current conflict between Russia and Ukraine might find it very interesting to see how Haldeman writing years ago managed to anticipate some of the developments which are now changing war, and even more interesting how he thought it might change further.
You can order it at:
The third book in the series, "Forever Free," IS the sequel to "The Forever War"
You can order it at
Or you can order a combined omnibus edition of all three books at
Three good books. But it is "The Forever War" which is the classic. It deserves to be remembered and still be available and read at the very distant future date to which the book's action reaches.
Mitth'raw'nuruodo
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