Joe Haldeman – The Forever War (1974)

“Relativity propped it up, at least gave it the illusion of being there... the way all reality becomes illusory and observer-oriented when you study general relativity. Or Buddhism. Or get drafted.”

‘The Forever War’ is at heart a war novel. Joe Haldeman had served in Vietnam and his experiences inform the book. The concept is pure hard SF worthy of Robert Heinlein or Larry Niven. Soldiers are conscripted to fight in an interstellar war. Because of relativity a few years passing for the soldiers means many decades passing back on earth, they return home to a world hopelessly alien to them that has forgotten all about them. The soldiers finding themselves lost and out of touch in a world that has drastically moved on without them is a powerful metaphor for the reception the soldiers returning home from Vietnam received in reality. The main weapon that the soldiers use to fight the hive-mind aliens is even powered armour, same as in Heinlein’s ‘Starship Troopers’. But the two books could not be further apart. ‘The Forever War’ is about the horror and futility of war, and the senseless waste of lives lost and displaced that follow.

   The protagonist is William Mandella, one of a hundred strong and healthy young people with IQs above 150 called up to fight against a terrifying unknown alien threat that has been destroying Earth spaceships. From the beginning, Mandella is cynical about the army. He studied physics and was looking to go into teaching and has no desire to be in the army or fight in a war. Unlike the protagonist of ‘Starship Troopers’, who learns that the army is always right, Mandella’s experience is one of horror, pain and grief. There is an argument that any anti-war story has the problem that it is inherently glamourising war by turning it into entertainment, no matter what the ultimate message. ‘The Forever War’ uses this to its advantage by initially appearing to be a fun, Heinlein-esque space adventure yarn, in much the same way that William Goldings’ ‘Lord Of The Flies’ initially appears to be a Ballentyne-esque boys’ adventure before things start to go wrong. Mandella, with his high IQ, his easygoing competence and his laidback, wry tone, could easily be a Heinlein protagonist.

   The recruits start off their training on the moon, and then on the planet Charon, more than twice the distance from the sun as Pluto, to prepare them for the conditions of war in space. It doesn’t take long for things to start going wrong in these harsh conditions. The soldiers are warned that the slightest mistake in space can lead to their deaths, and many of them die messy, unglamourous deaths in training. Much of the novel’s power comes from the way Haldeman describes these deaths. The tone is achingly sad but never over the top, calm and without embellishment as Mandella describes truly horrific death. It effectively conveys the feeling of loss over this senseless waste of human life.

   Soon enough Mandella and the others are shipped off to the first confrontation with the Taurans, engaging in a series of bloody battles that most of them don’t survive. Mandella doesn’t relish killing other sentient beings, and survives more through luck rather than battle prowess, and the one battle that he does actually lead goes pretty poorly. Haldeman does a really good job of conveying the idea that war is not full of glorious victories and excitement, but long stretches of routine interrupted by moments of terror and violence. It’s another reason why ‘The Forever War’ is so crucial; it’s just about the only military SF book that’s not violently militaristic. The book is also sensibly cynical about both the military and the government. The army is not above implanting subconscious conditioning in the soldiers’ heads to make them better killers, without telling them. At the end it turns out that the Taurans had never known war until encountering humanity, and that the war had been started and prolonged by humans because the Earth economy needed a war to fuel it.

   On top of all this, ‘The Forever War’ is a deeply affecting love story. Mandella’s relationship with Marygay Potter, another soldier in his original company and the only one to survive as long as he does, is perfectly natural and believable. Throughout the novel they become more and more important to each other as they end up being their only remaining connection to the world they grew up in. I will admit to getting a bit emotional at the bits where he discovers her grievously injured in the acceleration shell, when they are separated again the final time they are ordered back into duty, and again at the end when he discovers that she has been waiting for him to return all this time.

   The message of ‘The Forever War’ about the human cost of war is always relevant, and it’s all the more important in a genre that frequently celebrates and glorifies violence. At a time when an adaptation of ‘Ender’s Game’ by Orson Scott Card is hitting the theatres, (a book that is well written but problematic before you even get to Card’s deeply unpleasant personal opinions), it’s clear that militaristic tendencies are still alive and well in the genre, and Haldeman’s deconstruction of those ideas remain just as powerful and moving as it must have been when it was first published.

Poul Anderson - Tau Zero (1970)

   There is a cliche about hard science fiction, that it concentrates on the science aspect at the expense of the character work necessary to make compelling fiction. This is frequently unfair to a genre that is at its heart about the human condition - great SF is resonant because, however weird and wonderful the world the author creates, the characters still reflect something recongisable back to the reader. This can allow SF writers to ask daring questions about the directions society may be heading in, but equally it can mean an enthusiastic and gifted writer can get bogged down in the technical details. Personally, I don't tend to read SF books based on their 'hardness'; as long as the ideas and characters are compelling I'm willing to allow some pretty flagrant flaunting of the laws of physics. However, I do appreciate authors doing their research, and if the writer can teach you about a new aspect of science whilst speculating entertainingly on how people will use that technology and how it will affect people's lives, you have the makings of a compelling story. Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars Trilogy is a fantastic example of hard science fiction taken to the level of high art. Robinson's research on everything from the physics and bioengeneering necessary to colonise Mars to pertinent aspects of psychology for space travel is endlessly fascinating in and of itself, but it's coupled to a complex and tightly woven narrative about personal and social change, told in evocative and lyrical prose. The Mars Trilogy refutes that old cliche about hard SF, but if you wanted a text-book counter-example to support it, you could do worse than point to Poul Anderson's 'Tau Zero'. 

The equation's on the cover because it's the main character.

   'Tau Zero' is a thoroughly frustrating read. It's built around a fascinating concept - the characters travel in Bussard ramjet, a spaceship which is able to accelerate to just below the speed of light, which allows it to travel the vast distances of light years between the stars within a relative shipboard time of a number of years.  The closer you get to the speed of light, the slower relative time passes for you compared to outside the ship. Or at least that's as well as I understand the concept. 

Our hero's first appearance

   Anderson is really good with describing these concepts in a simple and engaging way. Or at least I presume so, for all I know he may be grossly oversimplifying, but I'm willing to take this on trust. And the book takes this core idea to a very interesting place. During their travel, the ship's deceleration mechanism is damaged, which means that the ship has to keep on accelerating, driving tau further and further down, and so  over the course of a number of years relative time, the ship outlives the entire collapse and rebirth of the universe. 

   This is a wonderfully compelling idea. The concept of relativity is a difficult one to intellectualise, and there is a wonderful sense of vertigo induced by that unimaginable amount of time and vast interstellar distances, all shooting by in the blink of an eye. There is something both tragic and heroic about this little ship, this small pocket of surviving humanity hurtling onward into infinity, long after the very galaxy that birthed her has dwindled and died. Plus we see that Anderson is very much interested in the human element. He is concerned with the physical and psychological toll that such a flight into unknown space and time would have on the people themselves. All the elements are here for a really compelling tale. So what goes wrong?

   There are two main problems here - the characters themselves, and how the author treats these characters. Anderson's ship is populated by a diverse, international crew of astronauts and scientists, both male and female. So far, so good. Unfortunately, much of the characterisation is very broad. I'm sure the intention here was to depict a future where minds from all over the world work together in harmony for the good of science, as Kim Stanley Robinson does very effectively in 'Red Mars', but in 'Tau Zero' many of the characters are so broad as to be stereotypes. Also, there is a tendency for the characters most important to the plot to be American or European; several of the scientists with more exotic sounding names only appear in scenes when the author feels like we need more speaking parts to share the exposition. 

   And oh, the exposition. Being a fan of SF, I actually quite like exposition, and am all for a quick paragraph explaining everything nicely and concisely when otherwise you would be stumbling around and hinting at things that later wind up being crucially important to the plot. Unless you're, say, Gene Wolfe, and creating this kind of ambiguity is your intention. But Anderson deals in physical certainties, and boy do we struggle with some truly clunky pieces of dialogue, where characters explain things to other characters who already know these things for the benefit of the audience. You could design a good drinking game around the different variations of 'As You Know, Bob' dialogue he uses throughout the book.

   Then we have the characters themselves. Our protagonist is Constable Charles Reymont, a square-jawed, masculine, no-nonsense kind of guy, who, once the crisis occurs, manipulates everyone so he can basically run the ship, because someone has to keep a level head, especially with all these women faffing around with their emotions. Other characters occasionally grumble about his heavy-handed methods, but the narrative and the author go out of their way to justify every one of Reymont's actions, to the extent that he comes across as somewhat Mary Sue-ish. This could have been made more bearable by having some of the supporting characters have stronger viewpoints or motivations, and allowing the conflict between these characters to play out. Again, Kim Stanley Robinson does this very well in 'Red Mars', where all of the characters have their own motivations and differing political beliefs, and no one really gets favourable treatment from the author. Indeed, 'Red Mars' has a character, Frank Chalmers, who resembles Reymont both physically and in character, and in the course of the book his Machievellian attempts to gain more power and influence over his fellow shipmates and colonists very much comes back to bite him in the ass. It's hard not to wonder if Robinson had read 'Tau Zero' and written the character of Frank Chalmers as a direct response to Charles Reymont. In 'Salt' by Adam Roberts, the central conflict between the two groups of colonists begins on the ship, and the author is able to explore the motivations and the greivances on both sides of the conflict; indeed one of the strengths of Roberts' book is that it explores the hypocrisy and narrowsightedness of both sides as human beings rather than supporting one political agenda over another. Intershipmate tension is a great method to ratchet up the conflict in SF, but by pandering to his favourite character Anderson doesn't really get the most out of it.

   And then there's Anderson's treatment of the female characters, which is just lousy. All the female characters are nominally scientists, which is nice, but the narrative treats them either as rewards or incentives for the important male scientists, or producers of babies. There is actually a scene where the female First Officer basically has to have sex with the brilliant physicist to stop him from having a nervous breakdown, because they need him as a functional member of the crew. There's another scene where a woman selfishly jeopardises the safety of the ship  by secretly allowing herself to get pregnant. It's clear that Anderson shares his protagonist's old fashioned casual misogyny, and one gets the impression the only reason either of them tolerate the presence of women on the ship is because, when the Leonora Christine finally touches down, they're going to have to restart the human race somehow.    

   I found 'Tau Zero' an exasperating read. Here you have a truly engaging concept, and an author with the intelligence and enthusiasm to do the concept justice, stymied by uninspiring writing and casual misogyny. It's a real shame, because there were sections of the book I enjoyed very much, and I still think there is the core of something very good here, but by the end of the book I was struggling to engage with the fate of the Leonora Christine, because, as much as I'm always up for watching something circumnavigate all of space and time, I no longer cared what happened to the people inside that ship.