alf his lifetime ago, Joe Haldeman recast the Vietnam conflict as
memorable, award-winning science fiction in The Forever War (1974).
His elite, technically savvy troops battled an alien foe across both time and space.
Poignantly, each engagement cut them off from Earth by
hundreds of years, as relativistic velocities flung them into their own
ever-more-incomprehensible future. At the end of the thousand-year war, it
all turned out to have been a mistake. And humanity, now a standardized
group-mind named Man, had more in common with the clone-like alien
Taurans.
Where could damaged veterans go in a universe like that? William Mandella
and his love Marygay Potter take Man's offer to live on a world sardonically named
Middle Finger (a.k.a. "up yours" or, even more obscenely, MF). Here,
unreconstructed relics of the war huddle away from a universe repellent in its
inhuman benevolence.In Forever Free, Haldeman returns, more than two decades later in both
reality and narrative time, to probe the consequences of the peace.
MF proves to be the sort of welcome home Vietnam veterans enjoyed--cold
and hard. Technology, surprisingly, is not greatly advanced after a
millennium. William and Marygay and their adolescent son and daughter
live in ice-bound rural Paxton ("peace town") where they practice aquaculture and
chafe under Man's benign supervision. If Forever War was a caustic
reply to Robert A. Heinlein's Starship Troopers, Forever
Free seems ready to follow Heinlein's Methuselah's Children: a stolen
starship, a run for the edge of the galaxy and freedom boldly purchased. But
Haldeman has larger fish to fry.
Can a wily, squabbling group of aging vets defeat the omnipresent
custody of their evolutionary superiors? Or is Man's non-telepathic group
mind a blind end? If Mandella and his conspirators manage to flee
relativistically into the remote future, what can they possibly seek that
won't be worse than their current anguished alienation? Might they find
God--and an answer to the horrors of the Forever War itself, and all of
human history's suffering?
War, peace and freedom
Haldeman is SF's consummate storyteller, his tales always illuminated
by a moral consciousness. Far from turning them dull or didactic, this is
what makes his fiction memorable, decade after decade. It is no accident
that a new British series of "SF Masterworks" chose The Forever
War as its launch vehicle. Can a sequel live up to such a reputation,
even surpass it? In this case, no.
Oddly, Haldeman's 1997 Hugo and Nebula Award-winner Forever Peace
is a "thematic sequel" to The Forever War. Set in a different near-future
than Forever Free,
that novel proposes a
cure for war and hatred in the tradition of humanistic SF, notably Theodore
Sturgeon's: just the sort of empathic group mind that Mandella and his
ex-vet friends find so creepy. It's as if Haldeman is restlessly trying out
all the variants on salvation, determined to keep readers entertained as he does
so.
The plot maneuvers of Forever Free are abrupt and startling, and
can't even be hinted at without ruining the story. One conceptual
breakthrough after another tears open readers' understanding of this universe,
until finally Haldeman deploys a kind of Gnostic explanation for the
world's pain. Gnosticism is a faith with few adherents these days, perhaps
because it is not very satisfying--and its claims are just as dubious in
fiction (except, perhaps, in the late, great Philip K. Dick's).
Perhaps Haldeman is telling readers that suffering is simply built into the
cosmos, laced through it, unavoidable except at the cost of extinguishing
the burning spark of individual awareness. The gratuitous cruelty that
climaxes this novel, and its gratuitous redemption, lurches from comic-book
excess to world-weary acceptance. The augmented fighting suits of this
quasi-trilogy have morphed into a stifling enclosure of the spirit. But
perhaps the deity Mandella finds at the end of his long road is just the
manipulative author himself, Joe Haldeman gazing pitilessly at his
creations behind the computer screen--yet another Heinleinian reprise.
Joe Haldeman and his wife Gay are perhaps the most beloved figures in
science fiction, regular convention-goers in many countries. I'm proud to
have provided the title for one Haldeman novel. So it grieves me to rain a
little on this particular parade. Maybe Joe is free now from the chains of
the Forever War.
-- Damien
hen a terrorist attack leaves hundreds dead on his home planet of
Jericho, Anton Cho is sent to the source of the bombing, a remote colony
called Eden. Eden is home to a religious cult which has preserved its
founder's mind--and the visions contained therein--by wedding his memories
to an artificial intelligence. The resulting entity, known as the
Memoriant,
has been sponsoring bombings on other worlds in the name of religious
conversion. Cho, under duress, has been chosen by the Jericho
powers-that-be
to obtain a copy of the murderous program.
He is less than happy about the job, and for good reason. Not only is
the
Memoriant dangerous, but a tenet of the Eden religion proclaims that DNA is
sanctified. Anton is a clone, and already considered damned; on top of
that,
he has made use of interstellar travel gates which are also forbidden by
Eden. As far as the true believers are concerned, Cho is beyond saving.
Complicating matters further is the fact that Eden has been sealed off,
embargoed precisely so that nobody can export the Memoriant.
As Cho and his genetically engineered bodyguard, Renli DaSilva, make
preparations for the trip, the situation on Eden becomes subtly
destabilized. Cho's contact is attacked by a man claiming he was guided by
divine visions, and the faithful begin to see signs that the Memoriant
program is functioning improperly. Members of the secular police force are
offered ominous but unhelpful warnings by the church theologicians, and a
power struggle erupts among the steel, Eden's youth counter-culture.
Instead of merely making a copy of the murderous Memoriant, Anton Cho
finds himself fighting to save the proto-deity from a fatal program
error.
Virtual reality, real danger
The Shapes of Their Hearts is a prime example of careful SF
extrapolation and well-handled virtual reality. Eden's Freeport is vitally alive with sensory detail and the bustle of a coastal city, complete with
harbor traffic and a population justifiably obsessed with storm
forecasting.
Melissa Scott has created a dangerous and dynamic culture, and readers who
appreciate cyberpunk grit will enjoy visiting both Eden and the inner world
of the Memoriant.
On the downside, Scott fails to capitalize on her tale's potential
strengths. Anton Cho and Renli DaSilva both come from intensely
self-serving
families, where every member's role and obligations to the larger clan are
clearly defined and, for both characters, difficult to accommodate. Instead
of having scope to explore this position, the two characters are
removed to a world far from home. Isolated from their relatives, the
personal issues are put on hold. Similarly, the friendship between the two
is only minimally explored, leaving readers longing for more. And while the
destructive effects of Gate travel are painstakingly spelled out, neither character is strongly affected.
This lack of payoff is complicated by the structure of the plot, which
is
disappointingly sedate. Cho spends the latter half of the novel trapped in
virtual reality with the Memoriant. Often he is just waiting for something
to happen. It's a relief when he attempts to solve the
program's growing dysfunction. Meanwhile, DaSilva is trying to rescue Cho,
taking small and methodical steps toward freeing him. There is a lack of
variety in Scott's pacing which makes this story less compelling than it
should be, given its many good points.
This had a strong beginning and lots of cool ideas, but it ran out of steam
fast.
-- Alyx
alf his lifetime ago, Joe Haldeman recast the Vietnam conflict as
memorable, award-winning science fiction in The Forever War (1974).
His elite, technically savvy troops battled an alien foe across both time and space.
Poignantly, each engagement cut them off from Earth by
hundreds of years, as relativistic velocities flung them into their own
ever-more-incomprehensible future. At the end of the thousand-year war, it
all turned out to have been a mistake. And humanity, now a standardized
group-mind named Man, had more in common with the clone-like alien
Taurans.
hen a terrorist attack leaves hundreds dead on his home planet of
Jericho, Anton Cho is sent to the source of the bombing, a remote colony
called Eden. Eden is home to a religious cult which has preserved its
founder's mind--and the visions contained therein--by wedding his memories
to an artificial intelligence. The resulting entity, known as the
Memoriant,
has been sponsoring bombings on other worlds in the name of religious
conversion. Cho, under duress, has been chosen by the Jericho
powers-that-be
to obtain a copy of the murderous program.
