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The Author of Our Best SF Military Novel Explains the Future of War

97 points by NoGravitas 11y ago

griffinmahon 11y ago
I read Starship Troopers and The Forever War back-to-back in like three days, and I wasn't so much of a fan of Haldeman's book, the writing just didn't seem as good to me as Heinlein's and in any case they're nearly identical -- though obviously the relativity thing and time making the "forever" part true was a very good point.
- notahacker 11y ago
  Saying they're "nearly identical" seems to miss the point that the former is a paen to the military filled with lieutenant colonels waxing philosophical about how duty to fight is the basis of all morality, whilst the latter involves a brazenly cynical protagonist whose thoughts of war mostly involve hoping to find a way out of it...
  - griffinmahon 11y ago
    I actually don't think it's much of an ode to war or anything. I go to the Naval Academy like Heinlein did, and when I read the small details of military life and the grandiose calls to serve, I read them as criticisms or as satire.
    - notahacker 11y ago
      As I understood it Henlein wrote the book at a time when he'd just formed a campaign group denouncing opposition to nuclear testing as a 'communist plot', and spent a great deal of time after the book's publication defending some of the book's more controversial ideas and their compatibiity with his otherwise mostly libertarian views 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.
  - sampo 11y ago
    > paen to the military 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.
    - mikeash 11y ago
      Given Heinlein's history and politics, I don't think so. Now the movie, that was definitely meant to be satire. Which is why so many fans of the book hate it.
      - phlakaton 11y ago
        I suspect the best way to read any of Heinlein is not to consider whether the story and arguments really represent his views; rather, simply to consider why they should not be yours. Rico is not necessarily a reliable narrator, so even if the book isn't a satire itself, it's fertile ground for one...
      - Jtsummers 11y ago
        > 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.
        logfromblammo 11y ago
        Some people, such as myself, dislike the movie because it was an almost completely unrelated script that was just reworked to have some of the same superficial elements as the 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.
  - benihana 11y ago
    >a brazenly cynical protagonist whose thoughts of war mostly involve hoping to find a way out of it... Catch-22?
    - justin66 11y ago
      Catch-22 was mentioned in a blurb on the cover of the first paperback edition. TFW is more subtle than Catch-22, but then again, everything is. Catch-22 pushes the envelope about as hard as a satire could and still be good.
  - dragonwriter 11y ago
    > Saying they're "nearly identical" seems to miss the point that the former is a paen to the military 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.
    - efuquen 11y ago
      Then I guess I, and Heinlein, read it pretty shallowly, since he's has been quoted as saying his novel glorifies the military. I still really enjoyed the book, but I don't know how you could possibly read it as not a pro military sort of novel. Obviously the point isn't to glorify violence for violence's sake, he attempts to morally justify the use of force in the same as has been customary for generations.
  - ArkyBeagle 11y ago
    For citizens, it was the basis of all political morality/legitimacy . There was a pretty well-kept wall between the citizens and the rest of the populace. By joining up, Rico is disowned by his father. And otherwise, Rico is a square-jawed fkup. 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.
- angersock 11y ago
  You should probably go back and read the books again, maybe with some more time between readings, and paying more attention to the people and less to the tech. The jaded, alienated Mandella in The Forever War has a lot more to say about the evolution of his society than Rico does. Armor is yet-another excellent contemporary to both of those books.
  - megaman22 11y ago
    Armor is fantastic. It's up there with Ender's Game on my list of military sci-fi.
pm90 11y ago
Mankind has been at war for most of its existence. Only after WW2 and the development of nuclear weapons has war become much too risky due to MAD and has made diplomacy a much more viable option....for the more powerful nations. Meanwhile, we still have civil war in Syria, unrest in Africa etc. 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.
- talmand 11y ago
  Mankind has always been at war with itself over resources. 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.
  - lukifer 11y ago
    The reality is that war is an effective means of population equilibrium, and it's no coincidence that its' enthusiasts skew heavily male. Genetically speaking, it offers a good deal: eliminate competitor males, and if you survive, your mating opportunities statistically improve after the war is over (and that's without mentioning the horrid connection between war and mass rape in ancient warfare, and still sometimes today). 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.
    - talmand 11y ago
gregjwild 11y ago
'“To say that The Forever War is the best science fiction war novel ever written is to damn it with faint praise.” It’s one of the best books about war, period' 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.
- ckozlowski 11y ago
  It's still one of my favorite reads. 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.
  - Roboprog 11y ago
    Sure, both authors are pointing out certain truths: the horror of being unable to defend your tribe against an existential threat; the horror of having to go and kill other beings.
- PuffinBlue 11y ago
  I often read comments like this about The Forever War and I'm never sure if I read the same book. I enjoyed it but it seemed an awful lot more shallow than it's given credit for. It just seemed to me that it raised lots of ideas but never really explored them fully. 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.
empressplay 11y ago
I don't think the author of this post ever actually read Starship Troopers, I imagine they've only seen the movie, since the book is hardly pro-war.
- rmah 11y ago
  I don't think the movie was pro-war either. It was, imo, a satirical in flavor.
  - doktrin 11y ago
    The movie was deeply satirical, but the book wasn't (either that, or the satire was well masked). For instance, Haldeman (the author of Forever War) is on record stating that Starship Troopers glorifies war, and he's not the only one.
    - shepardrtc 11y ago
      The book was definitely satire. Heinlein doesn't come right out and say how absurd the whole thing is, he lets the reader figure that out. I guess some don't. 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-us-the-two-careers-of-robert-a-heinlein/ http://www.locusmag.com/Perspectives/2012/11/the-joke-is-on-...
      - justin66 11y ago
        > The book was definitely satire. Heinlein doesn't come right out and say how absurd the whole thing is, he lets the reader figure that out. I guess some don't. 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.
mark_l_watson 11y ago
I read The Forever War several years ago and have been planning on re-reading it. It is a great book and I recommend you read it as both great fiction and for being faily much spot on given the current world situation.
cturner 11y ago
Just a thought. If you enjoyed these books, you might like _Old Man's War_.
- angersock 11y ago
  I didn't really care for Old Man's War. It's a fun read, but it's popcorn. It was a bit too juvenile nanotech wankfest for me. 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.
  - aetherson 11y ago
    The greatest crime of Old Man's War is that it has a wonderful hook: we don't want 18 year olds, we want our recruits to be canny and wise and experienced, so we recruit 70 year olds and rejuvenate them... 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.
    - angersock 11y ago
      Exactly! 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.
prodmerc 11y ago
Reminds me of the new Metal Gear game - the part about extreme proliferation of nuclear and biological WMDs so even small groups can have more power and be more equal to the big powers than ever before. 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...
KingMob 11y ago
For all those who haven't read it, check out the "sequel", The Forever Peace. I place "sequel" in quotes, because it's only thematically related, there's no continuation of characters or plots. 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.
- neckro23 11y ago
  Haldeman later wrote a "proper" sequel to TFW, Forever Free, but it's not nearly as good as Forever Peace.
  - NoGravitas 11y ago
    Forever Free was terrible, honestly. It's best to pretend it doesn't exist.
- justin66 11y ago
  > 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.
  - ghaff 11y ago
    I should probably re-read The Forever Peace. I, on the other hand, have The Forever War on my favorite SF list but nothing else of his that I've read--and I have at least a half-dozen on my shelf--have ever grabbed me enough the remember them.
mcguire 11y ago
This is a spectacularly bad article. 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/were-now-averaging-more-than-one-mass-shooting-per-day-in-2015/ http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonkblog/wp/2015/08/26/we...
UnBe 11y ago
For anyone in the Vancouver area, Joe is a Guest of Honor at VCON (http://vcon.ca http://vcon.ca), in the first weekend of October. It's a smallish convention, so GoH are usually easy to find and chat with. Full disclosure, I am helping put on the convention, but it's a non-profit convention put on by volunteers.
justin66 11y ago
The following post on Joe Haldeman's livejournal came up in a previous interview/story. It's relevant to some of the discussion about Heinlein's Starship Troopers. http://joe-haldeman.livejournal.com/51726.html 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...
fractallyte 11y ago
The cover story in Scientific American, August 2015, is about 'How We Conquered the Planet' - 'Our species wielded the ultimate weapon: cooperation'. This is a much more nuanced examination of what made homo sapiens so successful (and dangerous). 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...

97 points by NoGravitas 11y ago

I read Starship Troopers and The Forever War back-to-back in like three days, and I wasn't so much of a fan of Haldeman's book, the writing just didn't seem as good to me as Heinlein's and in any case they're nearly identical -- though obviously the relativity thing and time making the "forever" part true was a very good point.

notahacker 11y ago
Saying they're "nearly identical" seems to miss the point that the former is a paen to the military filled with lieutenant colonels waxing philosophical about how duty to fight is the basis of all morality, whilst the latter involves a brazenly cynical protagonist whose thoughts of war mostly involve hoping to find a way out of it...
- griffinmahon 11y ago
  I actually don't think it's much of an ode to war or anything. I go to the Naval Academy like Heinlein did, and when I read the small details of military life and the grandiose calls to serve, I read them as criticisms or as satire.
  - notahacker 11y ago
    As I understood it Henlein wrote the book at a time when he'd just formed a campaign group denouncing opposition to nuclear testing as a 'communist plot', and spent a great deal of time after the book's publication defending some of the book's more controversial ideas and their compatibiity with his otherwise mostly libertarian views 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.
- sampo 11y ago
  > paen to the military 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.
  - mikeash 11y ago
    Given Heinlein's history and politics, I don't think so. Now the movie, that was definitely meant to be satire. Which is why so many fans of the book hate it.
    - phlakaton 11y ago
      I suspect the best way to read any of Heinlein is not to consider whether the story and arguments really represent his views; rather, simply to consider why they should not be yours. Rico is not necessarily a reliable narrator, so even if the book isn't a satire itself, it's fertile ground for one...
    - Jtsummers 11y ago
      > 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.
      - logfromblammo 11y ago
        Some people, such as myself, dislike the movie because it was an almost completely unrelated script that was just reworked to have some of the same superficial elements as the 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.
- benihana 11y ago
  >a brazenly cynical protagonist whose thoughts of war mostly involve hoping to find a way out of it... Catch-22?
  - justin66 11y ago
    Catch-22 was mentioned in a blurb on the cover of the first paperback edition. TFW is more subtle than Catch-22, but then again, everything is. Catch-22 pushes the envelope about as hard as a satire could and still be good.
- dragonwriter 11y ago
  > Saying they're "nearly identical" seems to miss the point that the former is a paen to the military 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.
  - efuquen 11y ago
    Then I guess I, and Heinlein, read it pretty shallowly, since he's has been quoted as saying his novel glorifies the military. I still really enjoyed the book, but I don't know how you could possibly read it as not a pro military sort of novel. Obviously the point isn't to glorify violence for violence's sake, he attempts to morally justify the use of force in the same as has been customary for generations.
- ArkyBeagle 11y ago
  For citizens, it was the basis of all political morality/legitimacy . There was a pretty well-kept wall between the citizens and the rest of the populace. By joining up, Rico is disowned by his father. And otherwise, Rico is a square-jawed fkup. 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.
angersock 11y ago
You should probably go back and read the books again, maybe with some more time between readings, and paying more attention to the people and less to the tech. The jaded, alienated Mandella in The Forever War has a lot more to say about the evolution of his society than Rico does. Armor is yet-another excellent contemporary to both of those books.
- megaman22 11y ago
  Armor is fantastic. It's up there with Ender's Game on my list of military sci-fi.

pm90 11y ago

Mankind has been at war for most of its existence. Only after WW2 and the development of nuclear weapons has war become much too risky due to MAD and has made diplomacy a much more viable option....for the more powerful nations. Meanwhile, we still have civil war in Syria, unrest in Africa etc. 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.

talmand 11y ago
Mankind has always been at war with itself over resources. 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.
- lukifer 11y ago
  The reality is that war is an effective means of population equilibrium, and it's no coincidence that its' enthusiasts skew heavily male. Genetically speaking, it offers a good deal: eliminate competitor males, and if you survive, your mating opportunities statistically improve after the war is over (and that's without mentioning the horrid connection between war and mass rape in ancient warfare, and still sometimes today). 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.
  - talmand 11y ago

gregjwild 11y ago

'“To say that The Forever War is the best science fiction war novel ever written is to damn it with faint praise.” It’s one of the best books about war, period' 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.

ckozlowski 11y ago
It's still one of my favorite reads. 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.
- Roboprog 11y ago
  Sure, both authors are pointing out certain truths: the horror of being unable to defend your tribe against an existential threat; the horror of having to go and kill other beings.
PuffinBlue 11y ago
I often read comments like this about The Forever War and I'm never sure if I read the same book. I enjoyed it but it seemed an awful lot more shallow than it's given credit for. It just seemed to me that it raised lots of ideas but never really explored them fully. 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.

empressplay 11y ago

I don't think the author of this post ever actually read Starship Troopers, I imagine they've only seen the movie, since the book is hardly pro-war.

rmah 11y ago
I don't think the movie was pro-war either. It was, imo, a satirical in flavor.
- doktrin 11y ago
  The movie was deeply satirical, but the book wasn't (either that, or the satire was well masked). For instance, Haldeman (the author of Forever War) is on record stating that Starship Troopers glorifies war, and he's not the only one.
  - shepardrtc 11y ago
    The book was definitely satire. Heinlein doesn't come right out and say how absurd the whole thing is, he lets the reader figure that out. I guess some don't. 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-us-the-two-careers-of-robert-a-heinlein/ http://www.locusmag.com/Perspectives/2012/11/the-joke-is-on-...
    - justin66 11y ago
      > The book was definitely satire. Heinlein doesn't come right out and say how absurd the whole thing is, he lets the reader figure that out. I guess some don't. 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.

mark_l_watson 11y ago

I read The Forever War several years ago and have been planning on re-reading it. It is a great book and I recommend you read it as both great fiction and for being faily much spot on given the current world situation.

cturner 11y ago

Just a thought. If you enjoyed these books, you might like _Old Man's War_.

angersock 11y ago
I didn't really care for Old Man's War. It's a fun read, but it's popcorn. It was a bit too juvenile nanotech wankfest for me. 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.
- aetherson 11y ago
  The greatest crime of Old Man's War is that it has a wonderful hook: we don't want 18 year olds, we want our recruits to be canny and wise and experienced, so we recruit 70 year olds and rejuvenate them... 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.
  - angersock 11y ago
    Exactly! 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.

prodmerc 11y ago

Reminds me of the new Metal Gear game - the part about extreme proliferation of nuclear and biological WMDs so even small groups can have more power and be more equal to the big powers than ever before. 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...

KingMob 11y ago

For all those who haven't read it, check out the "sequel", The Forever Peace. I place "sequel" in quotes, because it's only thematically related, there's no continuation of characters or plots. 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.

neckro23 11y ago
Haldeman later wrote a "proper" sequel to TFW, Forever Free, but it's not nearly as good as Forever Peace.
- NoGravitas 11y ago
  Forever Free was terrible, honestly. It's best to pretend it doesn't exist.
justin66 11y ago
> 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.
- ghaff 11y ago
  I should probably re-read The Forever Peace. I, on the other hand, have The Forever War on my favorite SF list but nothing else of his that I've read--and I have at least a half-dozen on my shelf--have ever grabbed me enough the remember them.

mcguire 11y ago

This is a spectacularly bad article. 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/were-now-averaging-more-than-one-mass-shooting-per-day-in-2015/ http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonkblog/wp/2015/08/26/we...

UnBe 11y ago

For anyone in the Vancouver area, Joe is a Guest of Honor at VCON (http://vcon.ca http://vcon.ca), in the first weekend of October. It's a smallish convention, so GoH are usually easy to find and chat with. Full disclosure, I am helping put on the convention, but it's a non-profit convention put on by volunteers.

justin66 11y ago

The following post on Joe Haldeman's livejournal came up in a previous interview/story. It's relevant to some of the discussion about Heinlein's Starship Troopers. http://joe-haldeman.livejournal.com/51726.html 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...

fractallyte 11y ago

The cover story in Scientific American, August 2015, is about 'How We Conquered the Planet' - 'Our species wielded the ultimate weapon: cooperation'. This is a much more nuanced examination of what made homo sapiens so successful (and dangerous). 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...