The Forever War

Yesterday, I finished reading Joe Haldeman’s remarkable book, The Forever War (1974). The novel concerns William Mandella, a space marine sent with others to the farthest reaches of the galaxy to fight against an inscrutable alien race with whom human’s can’t communicate. (Think of the “buggers” from Ender’s game.)

The Forever War presents several provocative speculative inventions. First, the soldiers that are drafted to fight in the war are the intellectual elite; this is not a war fought by the underprivileged. The army also allows both men and women. Second, the soldiers experience extreme “time dilation,” a result of traveling through space at close to light speed. From Earth’s reference frame, the war lasts nearly 1000 years. For the soldiers, however, it spans less than a decade. Part of the novel then concerns how Mandella and others become alienated from events on Earth, how they cope with radically changing cultural, economic, and political situations. In a sense, this allegorizes the plight of any soldier returning home from battle to a home now unfamiliar. Indeed, Hadleman’s work is in part a reaction to his own experience as a Vietnam veteran.

While the soldiers are away fighting with the Taurans (who live in the constellation Taurus) over bleak, frozen planetoids orbiting “collapsars” pivotal to interstellar travel, Earth experiences massive population growth and becomes a quasi-socialist bureaucracy. Jobs are scarce and supplied by the government. Most of the population lives on a form of social welfare. Food rations are distributed by the United Nations; everyone is fed, but not most are not fed enough. Cities are violent and people openly carry guns to protect themselves or hire individual body guards. Even rural areas, in which agricultural communes have formed, are threatened by guerilla raids. Mandella’s mother is ill, but because she is elderly, she has been given a “zero priority rating” to receive medical healthcare. After she dies, Mandella reenlists in the military, resigned to the fact that Earth is no longer the place he once knew.

During another campaign against the Taurans, Mandella loses his leg and has an advanced prosthesis integrated into this body (the medical technician actually doesn’t use the word “prosthesis,” because the leg that is attached to Mandella is covered with his own flesh and nerves). When he recovers and is reassigned, he finds that homosexuality has in fact become the norm (in order to curb population growth on Earth), and that heterosexuality is a deviant behavior. As the new commander of his strike unit, his soldiers call him the “Old Queer.” The “Eugenics Council” on Earth has also attempted to eliminate racial difference from the population, and humans are trending toward one racially-ambiguous (and non-white) set of features.

In many respects, The Forever War is a staunchly humanistic novel. Most of the novel’s speculative inventions examine how war and the political and economic apparatus that sustains war threaten the individual. The Eugenics Council and healthcare priority ratings are examples of how the novel critiques technocratic government. Combat likewise dehumanizes the individual: Mandella can calculate, using a logistics computer, his and his fellow soldiers chance of survival during any particular mission; he is expendable. During combat, he is given drugs that eliminate fear, anxiety, or remorse for the enemy. The time dilation effect alienates him from Earth, and even threatens to alienate him forever from his lover. The complex of machines and technologies that sustain the war position the human as a relatively trivial actor within a larger cybernetic system. Indeed, automated lasers do most of the work during the fighting, space combat is painfully drawn out (because it occurs over such massive distances) and the soldiers spend most of their time in a gravitational stasis to allow them to survive the extreme g-force maneuvers their spacecraft must make in order to evade enemy fire. While they are in stasis, the ship’s logistic computer does the fighting for them. In order to fight on the surface of planets, the soldiers wear powered-armor suits that amplify their strength and provide life support.

At the novel’s end, Earth has become one singular consciousness, named “Man.” Individual humans are only appendages, although they number in the billions, of this macro-consciousness. Mandella and the survivors of his unit are the last to return home. They learn from “Man” that the war was caused by a lack of communication with the Taurans, and that politicians deceitfully pursued the conflict for economic reasons. The novel does end on a bright note, however: “Man” gives Mandella a note from his lover telling him she has kept herself in a “time machine” (by traveling at near the speed of light) until he returned to Earth.

If the novel is posthumanist, it could be through its critique of essential gender: although Hadleman (or at least his narrator) lament the dehumanizing effects of the war machine(s), the novel does suggest that gender and sexuality are constructed categories that change fluidly over time. The female soldiers in the “homosex” (who are birthed through technological means) describe penile penetration (of the vagina) as “disgusting” and “unnatural.” Hadleman is skirting some tricky territory here, but I feel he ultimately refuses equating non-reproductive sex or birth outside the womb as degenerate or sub-human activities.

As a humanist, if I can label him as such, Haldeman seems reluctant to let go of the idea of “freedom” or “choice.” Earth’s bureaucratic/technocratic government and the cybernetic war machine threaten human autonomy and the sacrosanct individual, and thus cannot be recuperated.