The Anachronist

WHEN I TAKE THE FOOD AND BOUNCE WHILE EVERYONE ELSE IS STUCK IN SEMINAR

Whatshouldwecallgradschool is officially my new favourite tumblr.

whatshouldwecallgradschool:

Hugo Quest: THE FOREVER WAR and FOREVER PEACE, by Joe Haldeman

I read these two awhile ago, but putting my thoughts to “paper” has taken me some time for them.

If you’re unfamiliar with it, THE FOREVER WAR, the 1976 Best Novel, is Joe Haldeman’s “Vietnam in Space,” a fantastic anti-war opus that uses the disorientation and trauma felt by soldiers in an interstellar war as a metaphor for the disorientation and trauma of soldiers returning from the US’s war in Vietnam.  Haldeman himself is a Vietnam veteran, and that personal experience with the horrors of war is certainly felt within the novel.  It is particularly amazing how this book contrasts with STARSHIP TROOPERS, but I’ll save that for another time.  THE FOREVER WAR uses time dilation from interstellar relativistic travel as a metaphor for the effects of having been in a war zone.  Where soldiers returning from Vietnam may have felt isolated and traumatized by their experiences, the soldiers in THE FOREVER WAR are temporally isolated.  In their experience, just a few months have passed, but in the decades or even centuries of time that have passed on Earth, a great many things have changed.  One part of the novel is even titled “You Can Never Go Back,” which is about returning to Earth.  This title is borrowed as a revolutionary slogan by Kim Stanley Robinson in his MARS books, interestingly enough.

FOREVER PEACE, though it shares a title and theme with THE FOREVER WAR, is not a sequel to Haldeman’s earlier winner.  It won for Best Novel in 1998.  It’s got a lot to do with drone-based warfare and how technologies that encourage empathy could eventually also promote pacifism.  It’s also notable because it features an African American protagonist, though I can’t say that this book is really about the African American experience.  I think that detail is just nice, since it adds some diversity.  I’m tired of the assumption that white is the default main character skin colour.

I think you can compare these two books in a simple, useful way.  FOREVER PEACE is an “idea book,” where compelling characters, technologies, and events interact in such a way as to make a point about human nature in the future.  In this case it’s about peace.  I don’t usually love books with that kind of goal, but that’s a matter of personal preference.  It’s a skillfully crafted novel.

THE FOREVER WAR, on the other hand, is about the visceral emotional experience of being in a war situation, being pulled out of time, and being unable to relate to the greater cultural context of the war that you’re a part of.  The feeling of having terrible things happen to you for reasons that society has long left behind.  To give it a name, it’s an “experience book,” much in the same way that STARSHIP TROOPERS is an experience book.  It’s to give you the feeling of having done something.  In this case, it should convince most everyone that they really don’t want to have the experiences depicted.  I gravitate toward this model much more easily; I feel like I’m being put in the shoes of the main character and getting a clear depiction of what he or she feels during the course of events.

I rather prefer the “experience book” model, but the problem is that it doesn’t always work well for idealistic books.  If you want to write a novel about the end of all war, that’s an experience nobody’s ever had.  So you’re stuck with the “idea book” model, which doesn’t always feel as real to me.  As a result, THE FOREVER WAR stuck with me a lot more than FOREVER PEACE, though both were masterworks.