The Forever War #1

The Forever War (2017) (Single Issues)

by Joe Haldeman, Marvano (Illustrator)

The visionary Hugo and Nebula Award-winning SF tale by Joe Haldeman is beautifully realised in full color by the legendary artist Marvano. An epic SF war story spanning space and time, The Forever War explores one soldier's experience caught up in the brutal machinery of a war that reaches across the stars.

Genres: Science Fiction, Graphic Novels, Comics

34 pages, Kindle Edition

Published February 15, 2017

About the author

Brother of Jack C. Haldeman II

Haldeman is the author of 20 novels and five collections. The Forever War won the Nebula, Hugo and Ditmar Awards for best science fiction novel in 1975. Other notable titles include Camouflage, The Accidental Time Machine and Marsbound as well as the short works "Graves," "Tricentennial" and "The Hemingway Hoax." Starbound is scheduled for a January release. SFWA president Russell Davis called Haldeman "an extraordinarily talented writer, a respected teacher and mentor in our community, and a good friend."

Haldeman officially received the Damon Knight Memorial Grand Master for 2010 by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America at the Nebula Awards Weekend in May, 2010 in Hollywood, Fla.

Reviews

[Jemppu · Rating 4 out of 5]

What a wonderfully epic space saga - yet from a very closely personal perspective -, with such humanity and frailty, poignantly describing the gruesomeness and redundancy of warfare. And with a side of centuries of pathos, to truly earn its name.

The art - it has some quite sharp disparity between gorgeous settings and action, and the unfortunate sloppiness and uncertainty in depictions of human facial features.

Still, the human characters aside (but not the figures), the art is powerful in drawing out evocative scenes; noticeably reminiscence of - and surely on some degree inspired by - Giraud's Moebius art, detectable from the determined and even pen stroke, and from the presentations of scenery and scope. And perhaps somewhat in the designs of the spacecrafts not based on real life too (and those that are, add a certain delight with the fact that for the on-orbit transportation vehicles of choice the book chooses to employ the space shuttles of its time; giving a rare opportunity to see the retirees in action on the edge of the universe war beyond their planet of origin - and way past their real life decommission).

Highly commendable is also the coloring; the final touch to bring the art alive and add mood to the scenes with subtle toning - the decisive color palettes for both the bold contradictions and the uniform washes rather enhancing the resemblance to Moebius.

Fantastic story, which will surely stay with. And has me that much more excited to finally read the original novel too.


Edit 08/2022: this review is for the full first book, not just the first issue; reposted here to the correct entry.

[Realini Ionescu · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Forever War by Joe Haldeman

10 out of 10





Science Fiction literature has the formidable advantage of allowing writers to use their imagination – and what an imagination Joe Haldeman has – without facing the limitations imposed on other genres – though come to think of it, one example would be the absurd theater…Eugene Ionesco, who has the same name as the under signed and was born in the same land has placed Rhinoceros on the streets in his play…The Rhinoceros – and the result is often an incredible fresco, a creation that is not just mesmerizing, but at times difficult to comprehend and grasp at, as in Solaris by Stanislaw Lem http://realini.blogspot.com/2020/07/s... wherein we have a thinking ocean, or in Starmaker by Olaf Stapledon http://realini.blogspot.com/2020/08/s... with other humans and creatures that live in a symbiosis and are superior to earthlings…



William Mandela is the hero of The Forever War and with his IQ of over 150, which is the criteria for the selection of his other initial companions, he has a chance to survive this conflict, in spite of its eternity – it tends to last Forever – though that involves fierce combat, mutilation in the form of losing one leg, which will be replaced with a superior technique, developed in the future envisaged by the brilliant Joe Haldeman, when the doctor sets in motion the process of regeneration – in looks like a good bet to say that the author is probably right in assuming that medicine and technology will be able to recreate tissue, organs, everything with the exception of the heart at the point where the protagonist is severely injured…there appears to be another limitation, for we meet another character that has had all his lower part, beneath the waist, replaced, but he declares he is no longer sexually active.

The main character travels back and forth in time, albeit not using a time Machine or any other fictional device, it is just the law of relativity, which explains how, once he travels with extreme velocity, the people on earth would see centuries pass by – well, that would be different people, for generations succeed each other while the hero is just adding months to his age – while in another dimension, those who fight the war with the Taurans are just becoming rich and remain young, only to observe phenomenal changes when they return to a planet that is seeing extreme violence rising, with humans forced to hire bodyguards to face the ‘jumpers’ aka thieves, a society that is facing a strange unemployment.



In this fictional, future economy getting a job is next to impossible – alas, if we look at the pandemic and the catastrophic consequences on economies, and especially on sectors like hospitality, we see that what may look at one moment in time as the subject for Science fiction – one of the next reads will be Children of Men, with its apocalyptic scenario – happens in real life, as farfetched as it had seemed just one year ago…now we have the alleged leader of the free world taken to the hospital and we are told that we should say nice words about him and send our ‘thoughts and prayers…but why should we do that, for a brute that had mocked Biden for wearing a mask for most of the time and the last debate was a showcase for the brazen rudeness and carelessness of the whole mafia clan that has an incapacitated godfather now…they have all refused to wear a mask, generally and at that debate, where they exposed the other camp and so many more to a virus that may kill the fat braggadocio…



Once back on earth, in the first few chapters, William Mandela finds that the currency is universal and they now use calories instead of dollars and though he has accumulated with compound interest a huge sum, the amount required for a trip to London is immense too, and he travels there in the company of Marygay Potter, a fellow soldier that would become the love of his long life – the main character would live for many centuries, given the aforementioned travel at warp speed – and in London the soldier kills a man, all this on a background of convulsions, fundamental changes that include a paradigm shift in sexual matters, where people become in the first phase inclined to be homosexual in bigger numbers a proportion of one in three, if my memory does not play games, and eventually, at a further stage, after some centuries, everyone is homosexual, given that they see this as way to avoid pregnancies, keep the population within the limit of one billion, which is anyway difficult to feed…

If we look at what happens now, the rate at which the planet is heating, glaciers are melting, sea levels are rising and hurricanes, fort fire, desertification plague so many lands, then we could conceive a future which is close to what we find in The Forever War, where the family of Marygay Potter would go on to live on a farm, as many others do…in the cites, there is a stage method of getting a job, by using a ‘dealer’, who finds people that would be the official workers, but they ‘sublet’, agree to share the salary with someone else who is doing the work for them, pays the dealer a cut and sometimes even sublets in turn, sharing the work with yet another one of the multitude of unemployed…



This is what William Mandela’s mother does, who has found a position that she now shares with a younger woman…in the meantime, ever since her son had been away to fight the Forever War, mother has shared her two room flat with someone else and she is more or less – or absolutely, I am somewhat confused over this and some other details and aspects of this challenging story…the thing with most of the fabulous Science Fiction stories, the merit worthy one I guess, is that the very advantage of allowing free reign, an imaginative plot and description, background, novelties, technologies, can be overwhelming, at least for yours truly, who finds at times that he is not able to follow and cover all the new weapons, advancements in medicine, the currency which is about calories and yet not exactly on spot…as in a stake is maybe 10,000 calories in currency, but for about two maybe three thousand calories contained in the meat…in this future, they eat mainly soya, which makes sense both from a moral, ethical standpoint, the killing of animals is brutish and primitive, but also in terms of the pollution involved in raising so many cattle, that use so much land and then release lots of methane in the atmosphere…

There is a message of peace and hope emanating from the pages of this mesmerizing, captivating, inventive, inspirational story that explores the limits of the earth and the outer galaxies, with exceptional creativity, including a beautiful romance, a love story that adds an emotional dimension to a fantastic, excellent joy ride…

[Benji Glaab · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5🌟
I haven't read the novel, and I didn't realize till popping on goodreads here this is a reprint circa 1988. I have to say I'm definitely going to have to read the classic for sure. There are some great ideas in here, and I live the gritty examples of war. One complaint was that it definitely had a summarized flow to it like someone took bolt notes and made panels with great quotes from the original work.

The art was fairly dece, and I saw my library has another volume kicking around. Just have to wait indefinitely for them to crack the door, need to keep those graphic novels flowing.

[Bill T. · Rating 1 out of 5]

So, by the end of page two, someone dies in a training exercise because people were too stupid to wait to start the timer on the 20 microton demolition explosive until everyone got out of the crater it was in—and the shrapnel blows apart the crater anyhow.

No, that's not a typo. 20 microtons—that is to say, 20 measly grams, and 40 seconds of running in low gravity wasn't enough to get out of the blast radius.

It didn't get any better from there. Lots of people dying uselessly, at best. People die in training from mistakes while practicing building an asteroid base, or, better yet, combat training with live missiles. Oh, and these people are all geniuses and super-strong, but their lives can be expended in training. Because dying's a great way to learn, right?

It gets worse. When they finally get done with training, we discover that our super-smart and highly trained solders have post-hypnotic suggestions that turn them into cold-hearted killers who "kill anything that moves", because no one bothered to actually train our super-soldiers to do the basics of soldiering. And, of course, it's obvious what happens next—the soldiers do a bunch of counterproductive killing after all their unproductive dying.

It goes on like that, people dying in various ugly ways, and you never really care because, despite this being a graphic novel, they are largely faceless names, and they weren't doing anything of consequence (let alone heroic) when they died. I gave up roughly a third of the way through, but it's hard to be sure, because, hey, why would you want page numbers in your book? At least the technical details didn't get any dumber.

Sadly, the book didn't work very well as a graphic novel, either. There were sequences of drawing of space shuttles flying around, but it wasn't at all clear where they were going or what they were doing. There were also sequences of red-on-black or blue-on-black text that were nearly illegible.

Really, 1 star is too good for this book. 0 stars might be too many.

Edit: My grammar were bad.

[Robert · Rating 4 out of 5]

Comics adaptation of the classic space Vietnam War novel does away with most of the weird sex stuff. Makes me want to re-read the original novel. Even though this adaptation cut a lot of parts that I liked from the novel, It's still a really good adaptation. Mandella and Marygay's romance kind of comes out of nowhere, but it kind of did in the original novel too. I feel like the 90s would have been the perfect time to adapt The Forever War into a movie (culturally, technologically, zeitgeistly), and that the Starship Troopers adaptation pretty much preempted any chance of that happening then. I find it funny that in this adaptation, all of the human landing craft throughout the 900 years of the Forever War look like Space Shuttles. I was also amused by the scene in the part with Mandella's officer training simulations of a Fokker Triplane shooting down a Fairey Swordfish. It's a small thing, considering that that the span of 16 years between the Swordfish and the Fokker's introductions is puny compared to the timescales in The Forever War. On the other hand, the Swordfish was considered a dinosaur at the time of its introduction, but was still a technological leap ahead of any aircraft of the Fokker's vintage.

[Barbara · Rating 1 out of 5]

This is a graphic novel code word for adult comic book

Not a fan of graphic novels. Although I do like his work is a writer however had no idea this was a graphic novel so it was purchased by mistake scan through it and it just bored the living hell out of me.

[Phillip Murrell · Rating 3 out of 5]

Read the normal-sized print

I thought I was buying the full novel and hit the one-click purchase button too quickly. This comic only covered basic training. It speeds through it, but I suspect the novel will take more time. I will definitely read the novel (as I planned). The artwork was good. All the comics would likely serve as a Cliff Notes edition to the novel.

[George Laskey · Rating 4 out of 5]

Enjoyed it

I enjoyed this book as a fan of sci-if books. Reminds me of the book starship troopers however in a bleaker light.

[Alistair Murphy · Rating 3 out of 5]

The forever war

Was getting into it but the suddenly I finished it. Way too short which is why only 3 stars ..I am taken back by that a bit.