The Author of Our Best SF Military Novel Explains the Future of War
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In fact, it's set much closer to the present, and the use of remote-controlled robots makes it feel super-current. Unlike The Forever War, it envisions one way war could end. The final line of the Vice story is "When war is unthinkable, it will stop", and in The Forever Peace, Haldeman shows one way it could be achieved.
As much as I love TFW, I personally think The Forever Peace is a stronger novel.
Honestly, a number of his novels are better, as he freely acknowledges (though not in this interview). It'd be pretty odd for a writer with a long career to perform his best work right out of the gate. (he's written several books in the last decade which are put together a lot more masterfully than The Forever War... I felt Camouflage was pretty close to being a perfect SF novel when I read it the first time)
It's certainly his most influential book, which is about being in the right place at the right time.
I honestly haven't cracked the Marsbound books yet, although I have them. There's something just a bit off-putting about series books to me...
I'm generally with you on series books. I understand why publishers and authors like them but there are so many out there that take an original concept and even get a good novel or two out of them but then continue on endlessly until all life has been squeezed out of the writing.
There are exceptions but they're a small minority--at least to my tastes.
I'd probably raise that on Gibson. It's one of the best books, period.
"The protagonist, an almost-anagrammed stand-in for Haldeman named Mandella, is hurled across far reaches of the galaxy to fight a poorly understood, apparently undefeatable foe."
In that regard, it's as much a commentary about war today as it is the future.
I found it a bit 'thin'. Perhaps that was intentional as a corollary to the breakneck pace of time-dilation Mandella faced and the societal change he faced. I always felt out of place and behind as a reader, never really finding myself fully immersed in the story Haldeman was telling, always wanting to stop and see more about how things had changed. I guess the 'world building' wasn't as good as I hoped for.
The Forever Peace on the other hand seemed to painstakingly explore the build up to societal change, then ended as it was about to happen.
Either way, both frustrating books.
Likewise. Which is not to say I thought it was bad. I think perhaps it was a product of its time? I could imagine it felt a lot more urgent and prescient when it was released than it does today (I read it for the first time earlier this year).
Personally, I found Use of Weapons by Iain M. Banks to be much more compelling when it comes to a sci-fi study on the nature of war. Each to their own, of course.
I think that this was a conscious choice by Haldeman - he wanted you to feel as lost as Mandella, who got a brief glimpse of a culture before being plunged yet again into another relativistic journey into the future. The only constant in his life was the Army, as inhuman and brutal as it was. I thought it was a good choice, but I can definitely see why you'd be frustrated with it.
I think the rationale is really that Haldeman was really commenting on the pace of social change, especially for service personnel, particularly those who served multiple tours. The protagonist hates the horror of war as much as the alienation from the society he is allegedly being forced to defend.
Though I can see why that puts some people off :)
I enjoyed reading it, but didn't think it was particularly great (same with Forever Peace, though that book had somewhat different issues).
It's worth mentioning that Haldeman wrote it in part as an allegory to Vietnam. It's often called a counterpart or "rebuttal" to Heinlein's "Starship Troopers", though you'll read that both authors had immense respect for each others' books.
In any case, I agree, "The Forever War" is up at the pinnacle of the art of Science Fiction and a near-perfect example of the message it can deliver.
Full disclosure, I am helping put on the convention, but it's a non-profit convention put on by volunteers.
Agree that it might actually read better with a healthy dose of irony, but just as with Henlein's awkward sex scenes, that's not really the intent.
I always thought Starship Troopers was meant to be a satire, not praise for war. Just like Springsteen's Born in the U.S.A. isn't a patriotic song.
Now the movie, that was definitely meant to be satire. Which is why so many fans of the book hate it.
Ironically, many people hated the movie because they didn't recognize that it was satirizing the (apparently) pro-military book.
It wasn't satirizing anything. It was just capitalizing on name recognition.
But if they didn't do that, fewer people would have watched it, and we would not now be discussing movie vs. book, because they would have always been two separate things. They still are, really.
When I read the book, I didn't see it as either pro-military or anti-military. It was a fictionalization of actual contemporary military experiences into a future sci-fi setting. The reaction should be in the eye of the beholder. The book may have seemed to glorify the military, because the entire premise of the book was that the military had essentially staged a coup against every human government, this making it the keystone of all human society. The rest is just how Heinlein thought things would work if the military were in charge of everything. Some things would work better; some would be worse.
I must admit that I haven't made much of an attempt to evaluate the movie on its own merits, as it already started off on the wrong footing with me, due to the attempt to trick people into watching it by pretending to be something it was not. It might have been just fine as Bug Hunt at Outpost Nine. But they chose to wallpaper a licensed property over the facade instead.
As a film adaptation of a book, it is the least faithful interpretation I have ever seen. It wasn't even sci-fi. It was more like a World War II movie, except I couldn't actually tell if the humans were supposed to be the Axis, or the Allies, or a little of both.
It was actually intended as (per Verhoeven) a satire of right-wing, fascists elements perceived in modern American culture that directly associated them with Nazi propaganda; the movie was largely written independently of the book, with rights to the book secured later after superficial similarity between some elements of the movie and the book were pointed out, at which point names, etc., from the book were added. Verhoeven says he only read two chapters of the book.
The film was a satire, but not of the book.
I don't so much hate the movie because it was satire, I hate it because it was cheap, lazy, unnecessary satire of either a phenomenon to which the book is at best distantly connected or of a very distant reading of the book.
Edit: So I assume that downvotes now are a form of disagreement rather than a measure of contribution to the discussion.
I don't think that's the case; I think that it isn't simplistically prescriptive the way that shallow readings usually take it, but I don't think its satire either. Its more complicated than that.
I think that there are a number of things that come together in ST:
(1) Heinlein's concern about what he saw as a then-current political current to dismiss what he saw as clear, current, existential threats.
(2) Heinlein's enduring strong opposition to conscription and view that it was equivalent to slavery.
(3) Heinlein's general frustration with the bureaucracy and politics of the day and feeling that it was due in large part to the incompetence and lack of civic mindedness of the governing class and, the electorate more generally.
ST, though, wasn't utopian -- it wasn't describing the way things should be -- it was an exploration of ideas related to these topics (and, in some ways, a release of Heinlein's frustration around them.)
> But its a common misconception that its some sort of military love-letter.
There's definitely an element of military love-letter -- particularly, to the individual infantryman -- to it.
That's actually one of the few things the common shallow readings get right (Heinlein himself has written as much, subsequently.)
At the same time, based on large swaths of what Heinlein has written (including non-fiction), there's also no particular reason to think that we're supposed to roll our eyes and take as satire the various lectures about honor and duty in the book. Nor take it as a general condemnation of the "military mind" or anything like that.
Even if the novel was strictly prescriptive, it wouldn't be saying that: federal service wasn't exclusively, or even mostly, military; federal service included the military, but it also included pretty much everything that would be considered "civil service" positions in today's system, and those positions significantly outnumbered the military ones.
In Starship Troopers it is stated flatly and more than once that nineteen out of twenty veterans are not military veterans. Instead, 95% of voters are what we call today "former members of teh federal civil service."
Here's some reading: http://www.locusmag.com/Perspectives/2012/11/the-joke-is-on-...
Its been quite a long time since I read Starship Troopers, but IIRC it doesn't read like much of a paean to the military on any but an extremely shallow reading.
I always took that as a way to keep the economy and the war-machine separate. You get the general vibe that it's an otherwise post-scarcity society.
If you were a citizen, you were part of the part of society that used force. It's the basic Libertarian trope about force in that regard.
SFAIK, ST was based on ideas from the Swiss system, obviously drawn to the exponential.
Catch-22?
Armor is yet-another excellent contemporary to both of those books.
http://joe-haldeman.livejournal.com/51726.html
I pretty strongly suspect that Joe wouldn't actually mind if the teenage boys the novel was targeted to read it as a satire, but...
Also, private military forces so countries can use them and deny their involvement and small countries can afford top military on demand, creation of a private military industry who will create conflicts just to have business/clients - interesting points...
Nominally it looks at subjects like long life, implanted AIs, etc., but it doesn't really do anything with them other than go "squeeeee look at the tooyyyyyys".
EDIT:
If you want to just bask in the sheer glory of superior firepower and gallows humor, and maybe even occasionally see something with a little bit more to say about politics and men who fight, I'd suggest the Hammer's Slammers series by David Drake. Future tank company modeled loosely off of the Foreign Legion just after WW2, the most mercenary of mercenaries, probably the coolest and most reasonable command-and-control for ground forces I've ever seen in a scifi book not set in the near future, and so forth.
And then it does basically nothing with that. The 70 year old soldiers distinguish themselves in no way from the 30ish protagonists of every other scifi story.
If your entire setup is "But we want to use old folks!", then you should really delve into old prejudices, being unable to change worldviews, reflections on what it means to move to what is effectively a Valhalla of endless figthing and fornication divorced from your previous life, etc.
None of that stuff shows up though.
By contrast, look at the entire handling of, say, Mandella and the changing standards towards homosexuality portrayed in The Forever War, and the dissonance of the veterans with younger troops about the purpose of the mission and the validity of the government and its past actions.
I'd also recommend his Redliners, which deals in large part with the need to re-establish empathy between soldiers and the civilians they fight for. Some elements of the plot get a bit silly, but Drake was exorcising some serious personal ghosts in that one, and his conviction really shines through.
It very much feels like old Pournelle/Heinlen stuff, with a healthy amount of cynicism about the politicians causing the various conflicts.
On the surface, it's just Space America versus Space Prussia, but there's so much more going on.
For instance, Haldeman (the author of Forever War) is on record stating that Starship Troopers glorifies war, and he's not the only one.
Edit: Just because you think I'm wrong with saying Starship Troopers was satire doesn't mean you should downvote me. Also, read this: http://www.locusmag.com/Perspectives/2012/11/the-joke-is-on-...
Everyone's entitled to their interpretation but you're getting downvoted because you come across as kind of a douche when you state things this way.
The notion that Starship Troopers was an antiwar satire is rare enough that you can't really link to a Locus story advocating it and then, boom, drop the mic. Successful writers who knew Heinlein, from Haldeman to Pournelle, have always characterized the book in a very different way.
When I initially read the book, I expected it to be pro-war. In fact, I just wanted to read a SF book about aliens and robotic suits. But after I was finished, I was very surprised by it being satire. Sure, if you look at it from a completely superficial perspective, it looks like its espousing the views of a military-oriented society, but if you examine what's being said, it becomes clear that its criticizing it. Let me be clear, though, I don't think Heinlein is criticizing the individual soldier. I think he sympathizes with them the most. But he takes the idea of a military-run central government to an extreme to examine what it would be like. And while reading the novel we get to examine it from the perspective of those most affected by it. And guess what... Everything is miserable.
Heinlein celebrates people who would give themselves up to fight for other people, but he shows that war itself is absurd and terrible.
This is kind of superfluous to the discussion but I'm trying to be constructive here, honest: all three of your comments on this story might lead one to believe that you are an enormous bag of douche. Reexamine your use of terms like "common misconception" and "quite clear" as an exercise.
> completely superficial perspective
See, you're doing it again with the douchiness.
I mean, the story links to an interview with a well-respected science fiction author (who has won so many Hugo and Nebula awards that it's like they are shooting them at him with a t-shirt cannon and who also teaches an SF class at MIT discussing Starship Troopers) and he disagrees with you about the book. Do you think he's just being superficial? I mean I guess it's technically possible that he just hasn't thought about the book as much as you have...
Acting as if the people who disagree with you just don't get it is making you look a little silly. That's what the downvotes are about.
Maybe my strong feeling for what the book is about (or is not about) is affected by me completely ignoring Heinlein himself. I'm not taking into consideration any of his other work or his history. I'm just looking at the book as is.
I guess there's a lot we could say about all that. I thought the movie version of ST and the book were both very entertaining in their way. (Haldeman's statements about the book as a brilliant didactic novel for teenage boys resonate strongly for me since I did lend the book to a friend who later credited it as an inspiration for his joining the Army...) I thought the movie did a great job of highlighting some of the absurdities of the book and if I had read the book in a certain light I wonder if I might have viewed it similarly.
I was being very literal. And I wasn't referring to the author in particular.
From the article: "Everywhere H. sapiens went, massive ecological changes followed. The archaic humans they encountered went extinct, as did vast numbers of animal species. It was, without a doubt, the most consequential migration event in the history of our planet." ... "The sad story of those first victims of modern human ingenuity and cooperation, the Neanderthals, helps to explain why horrific acts of genocide and xenocide crop up in the world today."
The article also brings up another tendency among humans, best summarized by writer Slavenka Drakulic: "Once the concept of 'otherness' takes root, the unimaginable becomes possible."
Our species is still evoluting. Perhaps, given new understanding and the right constraints, some of the most damaging behaviors can be bred out...
The author starts out with the right idea,
"It’s about as pitch-perfect metaphor for what it’s like to go to war a civilian can ever hope to absorb—not only is the organized violence of the battlefield interminable, but the dislocation brought about to those subjected to it is total and unrelenting, too."
but then drops off into the convenient and easy, but completely false, proposition that science fiction is about predicting the future. And does so badly:
"In fact, when we begin our discussion in earnest, and I tell him his book has seemed to have proved prescient, that all signs seem to point to a perpetual state of forever war, he laughs."
The forever war of the Forever War is a completely different kind of beast from the forever war discussed in the article. That first quote above is a very good description of the book, that war permanently removes even those who survive it from the society they were part of before, but the "military adventuring" that they go on to discuss has more in common with the late 19th century exploits of the British Empire (and the fiction regarding those) and with Vietnam itself than with the story of the Forever War. (As an aside, does anyone have any information about the longest period the United States has gone without using military force somewhere? I have this suspicion that post-Vietnam may be it.)
Then we get things like
"...3D printers may soon allow anyone with the right hardware to manufacture deadly weaponry at home. Obscene weapons are increasingly obscenely easy to find."
(Does someone need to point out that, historically, everyone has normally had access to something equivalent tothe most deadly weapons of their time? How about the fact that "3D printers" doesn't do anything but advertise that this is a "techy" article?)
and
"His words resonate, depressingly, when you consider that the US now averages one mass shooting per day[1], and that the trend is only accelerating upwards."
(The link defines "mass shooting" as "any single incident in which at least four people are shot, including the gunman." If you're having to defend your ideas with statements like "But there's an uncomfortable assumption here that some crime victims' lives should be valued differently — or are less worthy of attention — than others." you have likely gone off some kind of edge somewhere.)
And what am I supposed to do with quotes like, "'I don’t know what we do about that,' he adds. 'I wouldn’t feel uncomfortable taking away that freedom, and I don’t even have guns.'" and "'The idea of abolishing war has been with us for thousands and thousands of years,” he adds. 'I think we’re more likely to invent the speed of light.'"
[1] http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonkblog/wp/2015/08/26/we...
Once we colonize other worlds and space travel becomes more feasible, earth will become less valuable: the powers that be can relocate to another planet and just fight their proxy wars on earth.
The Gombe Chimpanzee War (also known as the "Four-Year War" of Gombe), lasting from 1974 to 1978, was a violent conflict between two communities of chimpanzees in Gombe Stream National Park, in Tanzania. The belligerent groups were the Kasakela and the Kahama, which occupied territories in the northern and southern areas of the park, respectively.
As the population grew and humans came into more frequent contact with each other, warfare was a natural by-product of the increased contact between groups.
Once we switched from foraging in a bountiful nature to scrounging a meager living from the dirt, defending that dirt or seizing more of it became a much bigger thing.
I'd dispute that. Don't confuse sparse population density with "bountiful nature"; hunter-gatherer economies are severely limited in that they can only sustainably forage as much as the environment can regenerate. The fact that they're territory-limited rather than labour-limited gives ample incentive to fight over territory, and also explains the popular factoid that these societies had vastly more leisure time than we do.
The introduction of nuclear weapons only removed the option of total war from the table, all the other regular warfare standards are still in play.
Ironically enough, I think these violent "selfish gene" urges have been co-opted into (relatively) less deadly forms of war by sociopaths who seek economic domination and control (typically using the recursive logic of game theory; after all, they're just keeping up with the other sociopaths). I wish I could remember the source, but I've read that conquest and colonionism is so expensive that it tends to be net-neutral even after extracting the resources of the vanquished; however, it is an extremely effective way to transfer wealth internally between powers on the victor's side.
Given the perverse incentives at work, the only way to reduce war is to pro-actively wage peace, from every angle: deepen economic interdependence, extend the circle of empathy through culture, and perhaps most importantly, continue to inter-breed across every geographic and ethnic divide.
As for your last point, I quote a movie that's a favorite of mine, Bulworth:
Sen. Jay Billington Bulworth: "All we need is a voluntary, free-spirited, open-ended program of procreative racial deconstruction. Everybody just gotta keep fuckin' everybody 'til they're all the same color."
Indeed.