The Forever War

by Joe Haldeman

Haldeman served in Vietnam, and this 1974 sci-fi novel provides commentary on that experience. William Mandella serves in earth’s war with an alien race called the Taurans. The battles are rarely decided by any of his actions (except a good one at the end). When he returns to earth after his first tour, everything has changed so much (due to time dilation, many decades have passed) that he ends up reenlisting. He ends up living 1000+ years (earth time) because of all the near-lightspeed travel, and in the end, he doesn’t return to earth.

The sleeping arrangements in the army are very 70s sci-fi, with female recruits required by law to sleep with the male soldiers. But in a later section (118), about a third of people are homosexual, and this is encouraged by the government. By the end of the book, all humans are cloned by the government, and Mandella is called “queer” by other soldiers for being heterosexual. “Only emotionally stable people are drafted into UNEF…. Heterosexuality is considered an emotional dysfunction. Relatively easy to cure.” (189) A Eugenics Counsel (197) was established because people made poor choices in their “genetic partners.”

“Some of the new people used ’tha, ther, thim’ instead of ‘he, his, him,’ for the collective pronoun. I wondered whether it had become universal.” (119) This probably seemed pretty farfetched in 1974.

A single currency is shared worldwide, and the governments use this to ration food. (124) “The government handles the distribution of all natural resources” (and jobs).

The credit cards of the future, as conceived of in 1974: Mandella receives back pay, “not in the form of bales of currency, fortunately. They used an electronic credit exchange, so I carried my fortune around in a little machine with a digital readout. To buy something, you punched in the vendor’s credit number and the amount of the purchase; the sum was automatically shuffled from your account to his. The machine was the size of a slender wallet and coded to your thumbprint.” (175)

“Future shock” = the feeling that technological progress was so rapid people couldn’t cope with it, “that they wouldn’t have time to get used to the present before the future was upon them.” (105) Relatable. I would love to go back to the pace of change from the 70s.