The Forever War

by Joe Haldeman

Science fiction as a genre has the benefit of being able to

act as parable, to set up a story at a remove so you can make a real-world point without people throwing up a wall in front of it.

To my mind, there are two things that make a novel a “classic”—a genuine classic, as opposed to merely “old and continuing to sell.” The first is that it speaks to the time in which the novel first appeared. There is no doubt The Forever War did this; its awards and acclaim are signifiers of that fact. The second thing is tougher, and that is that it keeps speaking to readers outside its time, because what’s in the book touches on something that never goes away, or at the very least keeps coming around.

Wars in the past often accelerated social reform, provided technological benefits, even sparked artistic activity. This one, however, seemed tailor-made to provide none of these positive by-products. Such improvements as had been

As for art, I’m not sure I know good from bad. But artists to some extent have to reflect the temper of the times. Paintings and sculpture were full of torture and dark brooding; movies seemed static and plotless; music was dominated by nostalgic revivals of earlier forms; architecture was mainly concerned with finding someplace to put everybody; literature was damn near incomprehensible.

Seems very much like today.

There were only twenty-eight of us left standing. Nearly ten times that number of dead Taurans littered the ground, but there was no satisfaction in it.

They could do the whole thing over, with a fresh 300. And this time it would work.

You couldn’t blame it all on the military, though. The evidence they presented for the Taurans’ having been responsible for the earlier casualties was laughably thin. The few people who pointed this out were ignored.

Like most of our wars now. No one but those who benifit really want them. The rest of us are ignored and propagandized.