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.

your chance to explain to people who hadn’t been there the confusion and bureaucracy, the muddled aims and random horror, and the alienation that those who went felt when they came back home to a nation and culture that they no longer quite fit into, because both had changed.

The Forever War was not an easy book to sell back in the early seventies. It was rejected by eighteen publishers

Intellectual and physical elite of the planet, going out to guard humanity against the Tauran menace.

felt happy, euphoric, finally getting the chance to kill some of those villainous baby-eaters. Knowing it was soyashit.

it was murder, unadorned butchery

Back in the twentieth century, they had established to everybody’s satisfaction that ‘I was just following orders’ was an inadequate excuse for inhuman contact

Back in the seventies, some people felt that technological progress was so rapid that people, normal people, couldn’t cope with it; that they wouldn’t have time to get used to the present before the future was upon them.

Wars are won not by a simple series of battles won, but by a complex interrelationship among military victory, economic pressures, logistic maneuvering, access to the enemy’s information, political postures — dozens, literally dozens of factors.’

‘So sometimes you have to throw away a battle in order to help win the war. This is exactly what we are going to do. ‘This was not an easy decision. In fact, it was probably the hardest decision of my military career. Because, on the surface at least, it may look like cowardice.

we’ve had so much death … you ought to be getting used to it, come to terms with it.’

‘Most governments encourage homosexuality — the United Nations is neutral, leaves it up to the individual countries — they encourage homolife mainly because it’s the one sure method of birth control.’

Our method of birth control in the army is pretty foolproof: all men making a deposit in the sperm bank, and then vasectomy.

world has only one currency now, calories.

they’d taken over most of the good parkland and subdivided it into little farms. If you wanted to find some wilderness, you had to go someplace where they couldn’t possibly make a plant grow.

his powder and paint had nothing to do with his sexual orientation. It was just stylish. I decided I’d be an anachronism and just wear my face.

Wars in the past often accelerated social reform, provided technological benefits, even sparked artistic activity.

Most people seemed to spend most of their time trying to find ways to outwit the government,

The most important fact about the war to most people was that if it ended suddenly, Earth’s economy would collapse.

nearly half the jobs in the world were associated with the war, and if it stopped, everything would fall apart.

we were given our assignment of choice. Nobody guaranteed we’d have the assignment for more than an hour.’

Heaven was a lovely, unspoiled Earth-like world; what Earth might have been like if men had treated her with compassion instead of lust.

The fact was, Earth’s economy needed a war, and this one was ideal. It gave a nice hole to throw buckets of money into, but would unify humanity rather than dividing it.