A great 'Hard Sci Fi' book for almost anyone!

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	• The Forever War Joe Haldeman Eos, 2003 - 288 pages average customer review:based on 292 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

A great 'Hard Sci Fi' book for almost anyone!

This was my first 'Real' hard sci-fi book. I normally read fantasy and have branched out occasionally for lighter scifi fare but I had heard such good things about this book from the reviews that I moved it up my queue.

First of all, it isn't a long book, only about 240 pages (depending on the edition) so it isn't intimidating to someone who might be new to the genre. The book is told from the point of view of a new soldier in the late 1990's who is training for space combat (this was written in the mid-1970s). It chronicles his experiences of combat training and fighting an alien race, as well as a glimpse of war and the military from his perspective. From what I understand the author is a Vietnam war vet, and many of the personal experiences those men must have had is correlated here (such as having culture and society change sometimes radically while you're away and the difficulties with reintegrating into that society). The book also touches on the politics of war without beating the reader over the head with any ideology, though some of the points are clear.

Secondly, the science. Sometimes its my experience that some authors get carried away with this part of a 'science-fiction' novel, by really hammering away at detailed, and often confusing jargon about the mechanism of the world they write, that the actual story gets lost (and I'm a scientist!). But this story utilizes the science to support the story. It is there maintaining its status in the scifi realm, but without overwhelming the reader or letting the point of the story get buried.

I found the story to be highly engrossing, and the science conceptually intriguing and reallying fitting to the characters and story. I'm sure many people say this about many books, but I feel that Forever War really sticks with you and keeps you thinking. Its interesting to see correlations between some ideas illustrated in a scifi book from the '70s to the current war being waged today.

I highly recommend the book to anyone though there is some darker images and sexual content if you're looking for a book for a younger teen and you are censoring these things.

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Nice Space Opera

No fantasy world here. Just a nice space opera. This could be another "young readers" take on "Starship Troopers" or even "Stargate SG-1". It's a great little escape that doesn't require a great deal of thought or analysis. Just choose a rainy Sunday afternoon and let the time pass.

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Sci-Fi based on Real Science! Wow!

Forget about everything you've ever seen or read about what high speed space travel supposed to be like, or what it will look like in the future. Joe Haldeman takes real-life Relativity Theory and translates it into this amazing adventure about space/time travel. By applying relativity theory Haldeman weaves this masterful story of how a soldier in earth's first intra-galactic war would be effected by the time-dilation effects of near light speed travel. While everyone else ages by years, Madella only ages months. The result - Mandella ends up being still a young man at the end of a thousand year war. From his own "relative" point of view, the war lasted only a few years, but for everyone else...! This is an amazing examination of science and human nature with a very hard lesson about the cost of war. Uncontestedly the best sci-fi novel I ever read.

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Excellent Science Fiction/War Parable

The plot and character development, rather than the sections depicting action, really allow the Forever War to shine. Although there are many parallels to Vietnam--an enemy whom we are inherently not able to understand--there are also parallels to today's war on terror. The final act of the novel, a long action sequence, weighs the novel down--much like the last act of Heinlein's Starship Troopers--in unnecessarily technical depiction of heavy combat and pseudo science. However, the Forever War, in its science fiction dramatization of the psychological, social, and personal toll of war on society, and in particular, one individual, remains a stand-out sci fi novel. Haldeman definitely deserved both the Hugo and Nebula awards (both of which he won).

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reviews: 1, 2, 3, 4, page 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14

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