Forever Free by Joe Haldeman

First published in 1999; published digitally by Open Road Media on September 27, 2016

Forever Free, unlike Forever Peace, is a direct sequel to The Forever War. It isn’t as poignant as The Forever War, but few books are. While it has a smattering of powerful moments, it is nothing like its predecessor.

After the Forever War ended, veterans and others went to Middle Finger where they were allowed to live as insurance against the possible failure of cloned perfection, an experiment called Man that has produced billions of humans, all communing with a group mind. William Mandella, a natural human who starred in The Forever War, is now 1,168 in Earth years, but still in his 30s physically thanks to relativity and all the interstellar traveling he did as a soldier.

Mandella and his wife Marygay think of themselves as prisoners, preserved as part of a natural genepool but given no authority on an arctic planet that is effectively ruled by Man. They decide their best option is to gather a bunch of humans and take a five-year trip to the stars, then turn around and (thanks to relativity) return 40,000 years later. They are surprised to learn that Man is only too happy to get rid of them. The trip will keep the genepool intact while assuring that the troublesome humans don’t bother them for 40,000 years.

Before the trip can begin, Charlie receives an ominous warning from an unidentified Tauran (the alien enemy humans fought in the Forever War). From that point on, strange things happen, disappearances of matter (and then people) that seem to defy the laws of physics. Not all of the events strike me as being logically consistent, but logic turns out to have little to do with the story.

Forever Free isn’t military science fiction. It isn’t space opera. It’s sort of a first contact story, but not really. For a while, it is sort of a survivalist story, although it isn’t the kind of modern survivalist story in which paranoid whackos lovingly describe their guns and bugout bags while eagerly waiting to shoot their neighbors after a mass disaster. This could have been a decent story about survivors working cooperatively to rebuild a society (cooperation being a concept that never occurs to the whackos who sleep next to their bugout bags), but that plot thread, like all the other interesting subplots in the novel, dies out before it develops.

At its heart, Forever Peace is a science fiction mystery, the mystery being, what’s going on with all the disappearances? The answer to the mystery … well, I was disappointed. Readers of a different philosophical persuasion might find it satisfying but, judging from Amazon reviews, readers who are hostile to religious belief systems consider Forever Peace one of the worst sf books ever written. That’s consistent with many Amazon reviews I’ve read by sf readers who are viciously intolerant of any belief system to which they do not adhere. Intolerance, to me, seems antithetical to the idea of science fiction, which should teach readers to be open minded. I have no religious beliefs and therefore do not share the belief system that drives the novel’s ending, but the book isn’t as bad as many one-star Amazon reviews make it out to be. Other sf authors, however, have covered the same territory more creatively, including Philip K. Dick and Arthur C. Clarke and even Isaac Asimov.

In the end, Forever Peace tosses out too many ideas and tries to be too many things, preventing it from developing any one theme successfully. The ending is a little too easy, almost lazy in its execution. Other aspects of the story are interesting, but it doesn’t work well enough as a whole to merit my recommendation, making this the only Joe Haldeman novel I can’t recommend.

NOT RECOMMENDED

Guardian by Joe Haldeman

First published in 1992; published digitally by Open Road Media on September 27, 2016

Rosa Tolliver leaves her husband in Boston after he sodomizes their son. Rosa and her son travel to Dodge City, which is still the far west at the end of the nineteenth century. Most of the journey is by steamboat, giving Joe Haldeman a chance to reflect on Mark Twain and to discuss a number of historical facts that he seems to toss out at random. Not much else of substance happens in the first third of the novel, except for the occasional appearance of a talkative but cryptic raven.

Eventually Rosa takes a lover and her son gets the idea to prospect for gold in Alaska. Rosa gets a gig teaching in a small Alaskan town while her son and new lover are off in the mountains mining for gold. Rosa agrees to this plan despite her raven friend telling her “No Gold.” Rosa is eventually accused of being a witch, and she might be one, given the amount of advice she receives from ravens. Or maybe the raven is a witch. Or maybe the local Alaskan shaman gave Rosa some peyote when she wasn’t looking. The would explain the interplanetary travel that pops up in the last third of the novel.

Assuming they’re real and even if they’re not, the aliens Rosa meets are the most interesting part of the book. Until they appear, the story is pleasant and humane but a little dull. After they leave, the story returns to being pleasant and humane but a little dull.

Rosa’s travels with her raven guardian allow Haldeman another chance to philosophize. His musings — metaphor presented as reality — might not be profound, but they are reasonably wise and intellectually stimulating.

Haldeman had an occasional tendency to delve into religious themes (Forever Free being an obvious example). Guardian flirts with the concept of God but doesn’t pretend to offer any answers. Haldeman is at his best when he writes about war and its consequences, and there is a bit of that here. Haldeman’s prose is also, at times, quite elegant, and in places the story is touching.

Despite the injection of the guardian and angelic aliens and a place where souls dwell and a chatty raven, Haldeman manages to make Guardian into a science fiction novel (rather than the fantasy it initially seems to be) thanks to alternate universes, which can be used to explain just about anything if you set your mind to it. Still, the story seems to be inspired by Carlos Castaneda and I have the strong suspicion that peyote is a better explanation for Rosa’s experiences than travels though the multiverse with a guardian raven.

I’m not sure Guardian coheres as it jumbles together an adventure story, a travelogue, an alternate history, religious mythology, and a mixture of fantasy and science fiction themes. There are certainly parts of the novel I enjoyed and I didn’t dislike any of it, but a good bit of purposeless description does little to advance the late-arriving themes that give the story its heft. The really good parts of the novel are too brief to make the novel as a whole really good

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS

The Coming by Joe Haldeman

First published in 2000; published digitally by Open Road Media on September 27, 2016

The Coming is a light novel. More comedy than drama, the story is notable for the amusing cast of characters Joe Haldeman assembles against a backdrop of alien visitation. Haldeman gives a nod to James Gunn’s science fiction novel, The Listeners, as his inspiration for The Coming. The stories are quite different, but the form is similar, in that each book explores the impact of an alien message on a variety of different characters.

A common theme of science fiction, present in The Coming, is that scientists make better decisions than politicians. That might be true, given some of the stupidity that comes out of Washington, but nobody elects scientists. One serious point in this otherwise light-hearted novel is that politicians who convene a panel of science advisors should probably heed the advice they receive.

Something is approaching the Earth at nearly the speed of light, but it’s slowing down. It should arrive in three months, on New Year’s Day. It sent a message -- “WE’RE COMING” -- that isn’t particularly helpful, but it does get the attention of the media, thanks to the astronomer, Aurora Bell, who first decodes the message.

From that premise, the story branches off in a multitude of directions. The Coming is a free-wheeling novel. It consists of short chapters, each focusing on a specific character, many of whom make only a few brief appearances. A primary storyline involves a blackmail scheme that is only tangentially related to the first contact story. More directly tied to the main plot is a president whose first instinct is “If we don’t understand them, we should kill them.”

The thread that binds the characters is their speculation about the intent of the approaching aliens. Haldeman writes convincingly of people who perceive everything as a threat, and add aliens to the list; people who perceive everything in religious terms, and expect the aliens to be messengers from a deity (perhaps coming to smite the unholy); people who view it as a hoax because they don’t believe anything that comes from the government or the news media; and people who view a visit from aliens as a chance to make a fast buck. Occasionally a scientist comes along who refuses to base an opinion on speculation rather than fact.

I like the novel’s future-building. Haldeman envisions a future in which America (and the English language) is strongly influenced by Latino culture, university students make high tech porn, homosexuality has been outlawed (again), and addicts use genetically-programmed designer drugs. The Coming was first published in 2000, so predictions of the future seem dated in only a couple of respects.

Dialog is strong and often quite funny. After the buildup of alien visitation, the ending seems too abrupt. It’s clever, but if this were a more serious novel, I would find the ending disappointing. I don’t demand a dramatic or meaningful conclusion from light fiction, so my disappointment was mitigated by the fact that the novel as a whole is amusing and enjoyable. It’s more a reflection of silly attitudes in contemporary American society than a science fiction novel, but that’s fine for open-minded readers who thinks science fiction doesn’t need to consist exclusively of space opera.

RECOMMENDED

Worlds by Joe Haldeman

First published in 1981; published digitally by Open Road Media on December 2, 2014

First published in 1981, Worlds imagined mankind's presence in space by the early twenty-first century, not to mention limitless fusion energy. Like a lot of older sf, you can advance the dates by a few (or several) decades and the story will still work.

New New York, a mining asteroid forced into Earth orbit, is the most prosperous of several Worlds that all share a dependence on Earth for the basic resources they need to sustain life. Nations on Earth have also become dependent upon the Worlds for raw materials and energy. That balance (or imbalance) is threatened by a discovery that could allow the Worlds to become independent of Earth. Chaos ensues.

Marianne O'Hara, a young woman born in New New York, goes to Earth for a year of study. Much of the first quarter of the novel, in diary or letter form, presents Marianne's thoughts about Earth in comparison to New New York (shorter version: Earth is exciting but vile). After that, Marianne becomes involved with a group that wants to foment revolution using means that are not immediately made known to her. Eventually her involvement iwith that group puts Marianne at risk while the group itself puts the orbiting Worlds (and the Earth itself) at risk.

Haldeman advances some clever ideas in Worlds, including the notion of "line families" that are essentially families that have incorporated and merged in order to avoid estate taxes. America has experienced a lower middle class revolution called "People's Capitalism." Citizens must join a lobby to vote (which police and soldiers cannot do, giving them effective control of guns but not of politicians).

Much of Worlds feels like a set-up for a plot that only gets underway in the last third of the novel. Worlds is the first novel in a trilogy, which explains the unresolved feeling when the novel abruptly ends. As a "teaser," I found the political background of Worlds (and, to a lesser extent, the characters) sufficiently intriguing to motivate me to read the remaining volumes. Because Worlds does not work well as a stand-alone novel, I would not recommend it unless you are prepared to read the entire trilogy.

The Open Road edition of Worlds contains a brief biography of Joe Haldeman as well as some photographs that chronicle his life and hair loss. A couple of other (aging) sf writers show up in snapshots taken at awards ceremonies. The Open Road edition also includes the first several pages of the second novel in the trilogy, Worlds Apart.

RECOMMENDED