It appears that Joe Haldeman’s excellent Military SF novel “The Forever War” is on sale for the Kindle for a measly $4.95. If you haven’t read it yet, you definitely should, and if you have, you should get a Kindle copy anyway just because.
I’d have to lie if I said that “The Forever War” wasn’t at least somewhat in the back of my brain when I wrote my own MilSF novels. (The first one is still in Slushpile Hell, and the second one, being a sequel to the first, will probably not get any traction until #1 is sold.)
Read that book a long time ago. Then one day a few years later … must have been shortly after the Gulf War … I took it off the shelf and started re-reading. TBARed* it within minutes, and put it on the next TUBS** run. One of the worst mealy-mouthed liberal peacenik anti-military diatribes I could remember.
His follow-up The Forever Peace was even worse. The fact that both those books won both the Hugo and the Nebula permanently ended my respect for those awards. Nor have I picked up a Haldeman book since.
* TBAR = Throw Book Across Room
** TUBS = To Used Book Store
Yeah, I mean, what the fuck would someone who was in Vietnam know about war anyway?
Wolfwalker,
Maybe his Purple Heart makes him down on war a little?
I mean, a young married guy fresh out of college gets drafted and sent off to get shot up in an unpopular war… why would he be bitter about it?
You don’t understand, Tam.
Does he have a right to be upset about it? Yes.
Does he have a right to believe he got shot up for nothing? Yes.
Does he have a right to write novel-length diatribes against everybody and everything that led to him getting shot up? Absolutely.
Do I have a right to dislike a book that spends three hundred pages lecturing me about how war is always stupid, war is always wrong, armies are a stupid idea, soldiers are stupid, generals are more stupid, and the only reason any general ever starts a war is because he likes to shoot things? Last time I checked, I did.
Whatever his motives for writing the thing, I don’t like the book. I don’t think it deserves to be called “excellent military SF,” or indeed excellent anything, and I don’t understand why anybody else would. Well, anybody other than a liberal that agrees with Haldeman’s biased view of war and armies.
I don’t think you’ve actually read the novel.
Don’t bet on it, Marko. You’ll lose.
Pretty sure I already have it in both hardback and soft.
Read that when I quite young, and several times since.
Might be time to read it again.
Have you thought about self publishing on Amazon?