Book review: The Forever War by Joe Haldeman

2026-01-25 BOOK-REVIEW

I picked this up after my boss, an avid sci-fi geek, enthusiastically recommended it. A pacifist himself, he praised the book's presentation of the horrors of war, based on the author's own experiences in Vietnam.

The start of the book felt very familiar: a young, educated man gets drafted into a futuristic army, to fight in a war against a murky alien enemy. He and his fellow conscripts get taken through a brutal training programme by a series of tough-as-nails drill sergeants, and complete sometimes-lethal exercises they learn to use futuristic power armour. So far, so Starship Troopers. Once I got past that, though, the story picked up and came into its own.

We follow our protagonist William Mandella through several tours of duty, witnessing both active combat and recovery time. The "forever" part of the war comes across thanks to time dilation, which allows his service to span decades, and then centuries, as the war continues ever on.

The book was published in 1974, some 5 years after Haldeman's own tour of duty in Vietnam, and the author's biographical inspiration is made clear in the main characters' names: William Mandella is a partial anagram of Joe William Haldeman, while his love interest in the novel shares a name with the author's wife. As one would expect of an anti-war story, it gives us an unflinching look at the chaos, folly, and brutality of a campaign being carried out by people who have little idea what they're doing, but need to do it anyway. Driving everything is the military-industrial complex, a socio-economic machine that's coldly efficient at ensuring there are always bodies able enough to keep the war going, with next to no regard for the people housed inside of them. As the story wears on, we're increasingly weighed down by the inevitability of yet another deployment, bringing yet more senseless death, always looming on the horizon.

When reading about dystopian worlds, I've always personally struggled to relate to find them relatable. The worlds of A Clockwork Orange or Fahrenheit 451 might as well be complete fantasy settings, for all of the similarity they bear to our own reality. One sequence near the mid-point of The Forever War, however, felt just near enough to home to be unsettling. Mandella returns to an earth that has now been supporting a decades-long intergalactic war. Society is shown to still be functioning—barely—but bleak economic prospects force people to desperate measures. As a South African, reading about the increased security and "neighbourhood watch" organisations attempting to deal with increasing crime was chilling, and not too far off from some of the news reports in our own time.

That said, the book is still science fiction, and it does give us some tastes of unreality as well. We get plenty of descriptions of future military technology, societal developments, and alien encounters, all of which make for some compelling world-building for this version of our near future. The time dilation also serves as an interesting plot device, as it affects the armies on both sides of the war, making it harder for each side to get a consistent picture of the other's capabilities.

The Forever War clocks in at just 278 pages, and is an easy-enough read in terms of language, though the bleakness of the story makes up for that somewhat. Once past the early chapters, I was thoroughly engaged, and I can unreservedly recommend it to anyone with to whom the above sounds interesting.