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title = "The Forever War - Joe Haldeman"
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date = 2014-12-05
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[taxonomies]
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tags = ["books", "joe haldeman", "reviews", "scifi", "the forever war"]
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[GoodReads Summary](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/21611.The_Forever_War):
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The Earth's leaders have drawn a line in the interstellar sand—despite the
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fact that the fierce alien enemy that they would oppose is inscrutable,
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unconquerable, and very far away. A reluctant conscript drafted into an elite
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Military unit, Private William Mandella has been propelled through space and
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time to fight in the distant thousand-year conflict; to perform his duties
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without rancor and even rise up through military ranks. Pvt. Mandella is
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willing to do whatever it takes to survive the ordeal and return home. But
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"home" may be even more terrifying than battle, because, thanks to the time
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dilation caused by space travel, Mandella is aging months while the Earth he
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left behind is aging centuries.
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{{ stars(stars=5) }}
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After I finished this book I had to ask myself why I never read anything else
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by Haldeman.
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In a way, this book seems to be the counterpart of Heinlen's "Starship
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Troopers": While Heinlein shows how smart the army can be, Haldeman seems to
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show how the army can be pretty stupid sometimes.
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It follows the story of William Mandella, who gets in the very first war
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against an alien race that suddenly destroyed a colonizing ship. Due the way
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humanity uses to travel the unverse, what happens in just a few days/weeks to
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soldiers in-route, the everyone on Earth it takes years if not decades. So, in
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the end, although Mandella gets into only 3 battles, his time on the
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battlefield (well, on the way to the battlefield and back) goes around 900
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years.
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Also, there are some very clever things Haldeman did. At the very start, I
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thought the story was a bit sexist. It turns out it was a very well thought
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point Haldeman did to make a very long arc -- more like a criticism of the
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sexism in the 70s than some hidden agenda towards sexism.
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If I didn't had just read yet another book about wars, I'd probably keep going
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through the series. But I guess I deserve a break after going through two
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different wars.
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