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3.5 

The Forever War

By Joe Haldeman & John Scalzi
The Forever War by Joe Haldeman & John Scalzi digital book - Fable

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Publisher Description

A soldier experiences the toll of interstellar war against a deadly alien foe in this Hugo and Nebula Award–winning science fiction masterpiece.

In this novel, a landmark of science fiction that began as an MFA thesis for the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and went on to become an award-winning classic—inspiring a play, a graphic novel, and most recently an in-development film—man has taken to the stars, and soldiers fighting the wars of the future return to Earth forever alienated from their home.
 
Conscripted into service for the United Nations Exploratory Force, a highly trained unit built for revenge, physics student William Mandella fights for his planet light years away against the alien force known as the Taurans. “Mandella’s attempt to survive and remain human in the face of an absurd, almost endless war is harrowing, hilarious, heartbreaking, and true,” says Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist Junot Díaz—and because of the relative passage of time when one travels at incredibly high speed, the Earth Mandella returns to after his two-year experience has progressed decades and is foreign to him in disturbing ways…
 

Now celebrating its 50th anniversary, The Forever War is based in part on the author’s experiences in Vietnam. It is regarded as one of the greatest military science fiction novels ever written, capturing the alienation that servicemen and women experience even now upon returning home from battle. This book shines a light not only on the culture of the 1970s in which it was written, but also on our potential future. “To say that The Forever War is the best science fiction war novel ever written is to damn it with faint praise. It is…as fine and woundingly genuine a war story as any I’ve read” (William Gibson).
 
This ebook features an illustrated biography of Joe Haldeman including rare images from the author’s personal collection

1671 Reviews

3.5
“The Forever War is such an iconic military science fiction novel. The depth of humanity hashed out is captivating. Written in a conversational, almost memoir type style, I think it can be easy for the reader to focus solely on the surface level story, which is an enjoyable tale of one man conscripted to fight in a war against an enemy that humanity has not even laid eyes on. The passage of time interwoven with space travel is honestly heartbreaking. Once you peel the layers you find the discussion of corrupt governments, broken economies, socioeconomic disparities, gender roles, government imposed ideas of the gender binary, population politics, and war as a machine of capitalism all wrapped up in a large scale multi century space war. There is so much to be said about The Forever War but that’s why people study it as a cornerstone in science fiction.”

About Joe Haldeman

Joe Haldeman began his writing career while he was still in the army. Drafted in 1967, he fought in the Central Highlands of Vietnam as a combat engineer with the Fourth Division. He was awarded several medals, including a Purple Heart.

Haldeman sold his first story in 1969 and has since written over two dozen novels and five collections of short stories and poetry. He has won the Nebula and Hugo Awards for his novels, novellas, poems, and short stories, as well as the John W. Campbell Memorial Award, the Locus Award, the Rhysling Award, the World Fantasy Award, and the James Tiptree, Jr. Award. His works include The Forever War, Forever Peace, Camouflage, 1968, the Worlds saga, and the Marsbound series.

Haldeman recently retired after many years as an associate professor in the Department of Writing and Humanistic Studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He and his wife, Gay, live in Florida, where he also paints, plays the guitar, rides his bicycle, and studies the skies with his telescope. 

John Scalzi

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