> ... and Earthlings forget or stop caring about the war. [spoilers] Not quite. Humans develop (via cloning and other tech) to the point where they can finall

> ... and Earthlings forget or stop caring about the war. [spoilers] Not quite. Humans develop (via cloning and other tech) to the point where they can finally communicate with the hive-mind aliens, and realise that the whole 1000-year war has essentially been a mistake from the outset. > It was an allegory for the U.S. involvement in the war in Vietnam Yes. The obvious allegory is that to the very few baseline humans who survive the entire war due to time dilation effects the whole thing was a complete waste of time. A key subplot in the book is that humanity adopts homosexuality such that in the latter stages of the war, the baseline heterosexual veterans are perceived as weird sexual deviants. This seems to me allegory for the difficulty Vietnam vets had in readjusting to civilian life.