The Forever War by Joe HaldemanMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
Despite the title, this not a book about combat. It's about the human experience as a pawn in a faceless military machine. It's also a vision of several futures, as soldier William Mandella travels across centuries of bureaucracy (preserved by the relativistic effects of long stretches of near-lightspeed travel). Published in 1974, it's an anti-war war book, rife with cynicism, disillusionment, and alienation.
It's also a story about how a man from our world (the protagonist is born in the 1970s) deals with being thrown into the future, having to adapt to changing realities of society, combat, and even what it means to be human. By the time he gets to the year 3143, he's just as much an alien as the "enemy", who we barely meet.
There's no sci-fi messiah, no computer overlord, and no futuristic deus ex machina, all of which is refreshing. The imagined technology is terrific (remember the "I know kung fu" sequence from the Matrix? It's a direct lift from Haldeman) but the plot stays very human. The ending is a bit trite, in which our hero lives happily ever after in paradise and restores the nuclear family, but the book remains a muscular, imaginative, plausible vision of what our world could become.
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