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.
I was given this book and urged to read it by a friend several years ago. I recently reread it and it has lost none of the impact from my first experience. Written during the 1970s but set in an imagined 1990s, the Forever War tells the tale of William Mandella, a soldier sent to fight an unknown enemy on the other side of the galaxy.
Other than being an allegory of the Vietnam War, the most outstanding feature of this (short) story is the author’s realistic world building. Using hard science as the basis for the action, Haldeman, describes a galaxy that bound by real physics and consequences. Temperature, time and gravity are all characters, as is a very believable social commentary that is the subtext of the novel. The climax of the story is a battle to the death between the humans and the Taurans using a combination of fantastic and ancient weapons as well as wit and tactics to win the day.
I recommend this book to anyone who has a love of science-fiction, adventure or just really clever and unique ideas.
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