by Joe Haldeman
The Forever War Series
The Forever War, A Separate War, and Forever Free
Joe Haldeman
CONTENTS
The Forever War
Foreword
Author’s Note
Private Mandella
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Sergeant Mandella 2007—2024 AD
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Lieutenant Mandella 2024—2389 AD
Chapter 1
Major Mandella 2458—3143 AD
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
A Separate War
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
Forever Free
Book One: The Book of Genesis
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Book Two: The Book of Changes
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Book Three: The Book of Exodus
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
Sixteen
Seventeen
Book Four: The Book of the Dead
Eighteen
Nineteen
Twenty
Twenty-one
Twenty-two
Twenty-three
Twenty-four
Twenty-five
Twenty-six
Twenty-seven
Book Five: The Book of Apocrypha
Twenty-eight
Twenty-nine
Thirty
Book Six: The Book of Revelation
Thirty-one
Thirty-two
Thirty-three
Thirty-four
A Biography of Joe Haldeman
The Forever War
For Ben and, always, for Gay.
Hey, Joe, I Read Your Book, or, An Open Letter to Joe Haldeman,
Cleverly Disguised as a Foreword to The Forever War
Dear Joe,
To get this letter to you started, and to set the scene for a theme I’ll get back to, I want to remind you (and share with the onlookers reading this letter to you) about the first time I met both you and Gay, which was at the Worldcon in Glasgow in 2005. I forget the specific manner in which we were introduced—I suspect my editor Patrick Nielsen Hayden may have made the introduction, as introducing science fictional people to each other is something he’s very good at. I remember saying hello and then being marvelously flattered as Gay told me that she had enjoyed Old Man’s War, which was at the time my sole novel, having come out six months earlier. After she was done saying very nice things about it, you said, “I’ve heard good things about it, but I’m afraid I haven’t read it yet.”
“That’s all right,” I said. “I’ve heard good things about The Forever War, and I haven’t read it, either.” To which you laughed, and then you and I and Gay went on to have a very nice conversation about other things. So that’s how we met.
Let me note two things about our meeting: first, you were entirely gracious to me in the aftermath of my attempted witty banter, because in retrospect (i.e., three seconds later) I could see how the comment might have seemed snarky and dismissive, even if it was not meant that way (fortunately for me, you took it the right way); second, in terms of high science fictional crimes and misdemeanors, mine, in not having read your novel, was a far sight greater than yours in not reading mine. My novel was the work of a newbie writer who only a few people knew existed (thus my pleasure in Gay’s having read it at all), whereas your novel was (and remains) a science fiction classic—a winner of the Hugo, Nebula, and Locus awards, widely recognized as one of the two cornerstone works of military science fiction, along with Starship Troopers. You could be forgiven for not having gotten around to my book. I, on the other hand, did not get off so easily.
Indeed, it’s a measure of the significance of The Forever War in science fiction literature that readers and reviewers simply assumed (a) that I had read it of course, and (b) that my own novel of military science fiction was riffing off of yours to some greater or lesser extent. When I admitted to people that, in fact, I had not read your book, I usually got one of two reactions, depending on whether they liked my book or not.
Here’s the one for if they liked the book:
Reader: I liked your book, man. I really like how you played the changes off of The Forever War in it.
Me: Well, thank you. But I have to admit I haven’t read The Forever War yet.
Reader: Really?
Me: Yeah.
Reader: Have you been, like, trapped in a box for the past thirty years?
Here’s the one for when they didn’t like it:
Reader: Jeez, Scalzi, I sure hope you’re paying Joe Haldeman royalties for how much you ripped off The Forever War.
Me: Well, actually, I haven’t read the book.
Reader: Uh-huh. So you’re not only a thief, you’re also a liar.
So it went, for a few years, until, in fact, I actually did start lying about whether I’d read the book, because I was tired of being told I needed to read it. I knew I needed to read it, you know? But I was busy, writing my own books—and, um, being distracted by shiny bits of foil. Yes, that was it. That was it exactly.
Finally, for various reasons, this last year I came to a time and place where I was ready for The Forever War. I took it down from the shelf (where it had been, actually, for a few years—did I mention that I am easily distractible?), closed the door of my office, and settled down for a good read.
When I finished it, this was the thought I had about it: Wow, I’m glad I waited until now to read this.
Really, I was—and am.
There are two reasons for this. The first is a simple and practical writing matter: If I had known going in about all the plot and character choices you made in your novel, I probably wouldn’t have ended up making the same basic choices in mine. Because, you know, as a writer I have an ego, and I wouldn’t have wanted to step in your footprints, and walked a path you had, even if it were better for my novel to have done so. I would have been self-conscious of it; I would have danced around certain footfalls, and I suspect my own novel would have not been the better for it. There’s a whole other letter I could write, unpacking this statement and what it means, but I won’t get into that now; suffice it to say for the moment that I would have felt like I would have to be original, even to the detriment of being good. It’s easier on the finished end of the writing process to be compared to The Forever War (flattering, too); on the writing end, it would have been an elephant in my head—too much pressure; thanks, no. I’m happy to have missed that. The second reason is that I believe that The Forever War was a novel of its time, and its time, for better or worse, has come a
round again.
It’s no secret, to you or me or most of the people peering over our shoulders here, that The Forever War comes out of the crucible of the Vietnam War, in which you served, and which, as I understand, marked you for its own, as it did with many who served in it. Science fiction as a genre has the benefit of being able to act as parable, to set up a story at a remove so you can make a real-world point without people throwing up a wall in front of it. You’d already essayed your experience in Vietnam in the contemporary novel War Year (which I had actually read, and gave to my father-in-law, himself a veteran, as a gift), but The Forever War was another, bigger bite of that apple—your chance to explain to people who hadn’t been there the confusion and bureaucracy, the muddled aims and random horror, and the alienation that those who went felt when they came back home to a nation and culture that they no longer quite fit into, because both had changed.
I grew up as part of the fortunate generation between Vietnam and 9/11, the ones whose cohort didn’t have to experience what war was, save for a few short weeks in Grenada and Iraq, in ’91. There’s another generation, behind mine, that did not get to be so lucky. Hundreds of thousands of them went to the Middle East and a good portion of them are still there. Thousands have come back with flags draped over their coffins. Tens of thousands have come back injured, physically or mentally or both, and some portion of them feel the same disassociation to the land they’ve returned to that Mandella and Marygay felt with theirs. Whether one feels the war in Iraq or Afghanistan is right and necessary or not, there’s no doubt a generation will be marked by it and claimed by it.
To my mind, there are two things that make a novel a “classic”—a genuine classic, as opposed to merely “old and continuing to sell.” The first is that it speaks to the time in which the novel first appeared. There is no doubt The Forever War did this; its awards and acclaim are signifiers of that fact. The second thing is tougher, and that is that it keeps speaking to readers outside its time, because what’s in the book touches on something that never goes away, or at the very least keeps coming around.
I also think there’s no doubt The Forever War is doing this, too, right now, in this time—it’s a parable whose lessons need to be learned once more. Like its hero, the book has come through time to be part of something; in this case it’s to be a reminder to all those who are looking to come home again—and those who care about them—that there’s someone who’s been where they are now, and who knows what they feel, and why. Maybe it will help them find their way back. I would have missed the power of that if I had read the novel earlier than this. I’m aware of it now—and glad for it.
All of which is to say: Hey, Joe, I read your book.
Everyone is right about it.
Thank you.
Yours,
John Scalzi
July 2008
Author’s Note
This is the definitive version of The Forever War. There are two other versions, and my publisher has been kind enough to allow me to clarify things here.
The one you’re holding in your hand is the book as it was originally written. But it has a pretty tortuous history.
It’s ironic, since it later won the Hugo and Nebula Awards, and has won ‘Best Novel’ awards in other countries, but The Forever War was not an easy book to sell back in the early seventies. It was rejected by eighteen publishers before St. Martin’s Press decided to take a chance on it. ‘Pretty good book,’ was the usual reaction, ‘but nobody wants to read a science fiction novel about Vietnam’. Twenty-five years later, most young readers don’t even see the parallels between The Forever War and the seemingly endless one we were involved in at the time, and that’s OK. It’s about Vietnam because that’s the war the author was in. But it’s mainly about war, about soldiers, and about the reasons we think we need them.
While the book was being looked at by all those publishers, it was also being serialized piecemeal in Analog magazine. The editor, Ben Bova, was a tremendous help, not only in editing, but also for making the thing exist at all! He gave it a prominent place in the magazine, and it was also his endorsement that brought it to the attention of St. Martin’s Press, who took a chance on the hardcover, though they did not publish adult science fiction at that time.
But Ben rejected the middle section, a novella called ‘You Can Never Go Back.’ He liked it as a piece of writing, he said, but thought that it was too downbeat for Analog’s audience. So I wrote him a more positive story and put ‘You Can Never Go Back’ into the drawer; eventually Ted White published it in Amazing magazine, as a coda to The Forever War.
At this late date, I’m not sure why I didn’t reinstate the original middle when the book was accepted. Perhaps I didn’t trust my own taste, or just didn’t want to make life more complicated. But that first book version is essentially the Analog version with ‘more adult language and situations’, as they say in Hollywood.
The paperback of that version stayed in print for about sixteen years. Then in 1991 I had the opportunity to reinstate my original version. The dates in the book are now kind of funny; most people realize we didn’t get into an interstellar war in 1996. I originally set it in that year so it was barely possible that the officers and NCOs could be veterans of Vietnam, so we decided to leave it that way, in spite of the obvious anachronisms. Think of it as a parallel universe.
But maybe it’s the real one, and we’re in a dream.
Joe Haldeman
Cambridge, Massachusetts
‘Man was born into barbarism, when killing his fellow man was a normal condition of existence. He became endowed with a conscience. And he has now reached the day when violence toward another human being must become as abhorrent as eating another’s flesh.’
— Martin Luther King, Jr.
Private
Mandella
1
‘Tonight we’re going to show you eight silent ways to kill a man.’ The guy who said that was a sergeant who didn’t look five years older than me. So if he’d ever killed a man in combat, silently or otherwise, he’d done it as an infant.
I already knew eighty ways to kill people, but most of them were pretty noisy. I sat up straight in my chair and assumed a look of polite attention and fell asleep with my eyes open. So did most everybody else. We’d learned that they never scheduled anything important for these after-chop classes.
The projector woke me up and I sat through a short tape showing the ‘eight silent ways.’ Some of the actors must have been brainwipes, since they were actually killed.
After the tape a girl in the front row raised her hand. The sergeant nodded at her and she rose to parade rest. Not bad looking, but kind of chunky about the neck and shoulders. Everybody gets that way after carrying a heavy pack around for a couple of months.
‘Sir’ — we had to call sergeants ‘sir’ until graduation — ‘most of those methods, really, they looked … kind of silly.’
‘For instance?’
‘Like killing a man with a blow to the kidneys, from an entrenching tool. I mean, when would you actually have only an entrenching tool, and no gun or knife? And why not just bash him over the head with it?’
‘He might have a helmet on,’ he said reasonably.
‘Besides, Taurans probably don’t even have kidneys!’
He shrugged. ‘Probably they don’t.’ This was 1997, and nobody had ever seen a Tauran; hadn’t even found any pieces of Taurans bigger than a scorched chromosome. ‘But their body chemistry is similar to ours, and we have to assume they’re similarly complex creatures. They must have weaknesses, vulnerable spots. You have to find out where they are.
‘That’s the important thing.’ He stabbed a finger at the screen. ‘Those eight convicts got caulked for your benefit because you’ve got to find out how to kill Taurans, and be able to do it whether you have a megawatt laser or an emery board.’
She sat back down, not looking too convinced.
‘Any more questions?’ Nobod
y raised a hand.
‘OK. Tench-hut!’ We staggered upright and he looked at us expectantly.
‘Fuck you, sir,’ came the familiar tired chorus.
‘Louder!’
‘FUCK YOU, SIR!’ One of the army’s less-inspired morale devices.
‘That’s better. Don’t forget, pre-dawn maneuvers tomorrow. Chop at 0330, first formation, 0400. Anybody sacked after 0340 owes one stripe. Dismissed.’
I zipped up my coverall and went across the snow to the lounge for a cup of soya and a joint. I’d always been able to get by on five or six hours of sleep, and this was the only time I could be by myself, out of the army for a while. Looked at the newsfax for a few minutes. Another ship got caulked, out by Aldebaran sector. That was four years ago. They were mounting a reprisal fleet, but it’ll take four years more for them to get out there. By then, the Taurans would have every portal planet sewed up tight.
Back at the billet, everybody else was sacked and the main lights were out. The whole company’d been dragging ever since we got back from the two-week Lunar training. I dumped my clothes in the locker, checked the roster and found out I was in bunk 31. Goddammit, right under the heater.
I slipped through the curtain as quietly as possible so as not to wake up the person next to me. Couldn’t see who it was, but I couldn’t have cared less. I slipped under the blanket.
‘You’re late, Mandella,’ a voice yawned. It was Rogers.
‘Sorry I woke you up,’ I whispered.
‘’Sallright.’ She snuggled over and clasped me spoon-fashion. She was warm and reasonably soft.
I patted her hip in what I hoped was a brotherly fashion. ‘Night, Rogers.’
‘G’night, Stallion.’ She returned the gesture more pointedly.
Why do you always get the tired ones when you’re ready and the randy ones when you’re tired? I bowed to the inevitable.
2
‘Awright, let’s get some goddamn back inta that! Stringer team! Move it up — move your ass up!’
A warm front had come in about midnight and the snow had turned to sleet. The permaplast stringer weighed five hundred pounds and was a bitch to handle, even when it wasn’t covered with ice. There were four of us, two at each end, carrying the plastic girder with frozen fingertips. Rogers was my partner.