The Forever War is primarily the story of a soldier named William Mandella. Mandella is a time traveling space warrior who jumps from battle to battle over a period of hundreds of years, fighting an inhuman enemy called the Taurans. As he fights, those around him die, and everything he knows back on Earth changes. Mandella is a draftee and when his initial compulsory service ends, he tries to make a go of it on back home on Earth. Things have changed too much, and so he and his paramour, Marygay, find themselves voluntarily rejoining the war in progress.
Without giving everything away, I will say that the ending to this novel was highly disappointing to me. There are many fascinating ideas explored within the book itself and the battle scenes kept my interest. The idea of societally mandated homosexuality was particularly interesting as author Joe Haldeman explored what it would be like if everyone’s sexual “polarity” could be switched from one preference to another at will.
Don’t read any further unless you want the ending spoiled. The fatal flaw of this novel, in my opinion, is that a 250 page novel was wrapped in the last eight pages as our hero, now a major, finds out that his thousand year war was all a mistake perpetrated on purpose by the military brass who wanted to boost the economy of Earth. For 200+ pages we are treated to war, war and more war. Then it the last eight pages, we find out a thousand year life has been nothing but a mistake perpetrated by amoral men. The Forever War was an interesting read, but the plot wrap didn’t sink in too well for me. I’m in the middle of a real war in Iraq and there are two groups here who have been killing each other for about 1,200 years on and off. They are called Shia and Sunni. I’m not sure how realistic it is to ever expect that a war, once begun, will end with a societal epiphany like “Oh, it was all just a giant miscommunication. Everyone stop fighting.”
War may be a monument to human stupidity, but we’ve got a lot of stupid left to kill off and some of us seem to be breeding even more stupid. Until we fix that, war is going to be a fact of being human. The Forever War is an enjoyable read but it didn’t really change my worldview any.