Ελληνικά
Last Updated on 07:16 PM by Giorgos Tsekas
Publisher: Gollancz
Year: 1974 (First Edition), 2006 (Omnibus edition)
Joe Haldeman, born in 1943, studied physics and astronomy. He was one of the unfortunate Americans who were conscripted for the Vietnam War. When he returned he wrote The Forever War, a classic sci-fi anti-war masterpiece that he found really difficult to publish despite his efforts. It was dismissed by 18 publishers with the classic excuse of “It is a very good book, but nobody wants to read a sci-fi book about Vietnam.”
Despite the fact that this particular war was the impetus for the book, its anti-war message remains vibrant and modern even today when, for the younger generations, Vietnam is a movie script or just the name of a country in Asia.
The Forever War however does not focus neither in the political theory of war, nor on its effects on the civilian population. The enemy is so different, so foreign (Taurans are aliens after all) that we can’t understand its particularities at all. The core of the book is the soldier: how he begins as a citizen and how he turns out at the end of his service, unable to reintegrate into society, the same society from which he came. A society that sent him to the hell of war and which can not understand him now that he has returned.
This is skillfully presented with the concept of time-dilation (Theory of Relativity). Often travelling at speeds approaching the speed of light, the soldiers perceive time completely differently compared to the inhabitants of Earth, resulting in them considering the evolution of society as unreal. Imagine going on a journey, only to return after 300 years have passed back home. How different will society and its values have become? It is this impossibility of adaptation and lack of understanding that leads the veteran back to the hell of war. Not because he likes it or because he is a psychotic killer, but because it’s the only life he knows and understands anymore.
And when the war ends there are no winners. Mankind managed to evolve at last and is able to truly communicate with the enemy. It is then when our hero discovers that all those deaths, all the hatred and all the soldiers’ time and efforts have been for nothing. The only excuse is that Taurans have a completely different perception and that communication had been impossible until now. How empty are “our” excuses when we go to war? Because surely we can communicate, we’re not from a different planet.
