Future shock and awe | Forever Peace (Remembering Tomorrow)

Forever Peace is good but not great--read The Forever War | Forever Peace (Remembering Tomorrow) | Joe Haldeman

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	• Forever Peace (Remembering Tomorrow) Joe Haldeman Ace, 1998 - 368 pages average customer review:based on 117 reviews view larger image
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Better than "Forever War"

I read this book because Joe Haldeman was a special guest at the ArmadilloCon 2008. I'm not sure I would have read it otherwise, because I wasn't too impressed with his much better known novel, "Forever War". Yet I was pleasantly surprised.

Not only "Forever Peace" is not a sequel to "Forever War": it's not even set in the same future. The only thing they have in common is that there is an endless war going on in both, but in "Peace" it's confined to Earth. Oh, and "Forever Peace" actually has a plot, which alone puts it head and shoulders above "Forever War". It's also not ridden with anachronisms. More than that, the political and cultural picture of the world portrayed in "Forever Peace" feels so much like our own it's hard to believe it was written before some key events that defined the current political climate. There is an amorphous war against ill-defined "rebels"; there are religious fanatics hoping to bring about the end of the world; there is even a high energy particle accelerator, which prompts fears that it will destroy the universe by accidentally creating an exotic form of matter that would swallow all conventional matter. It's as if Joe Haldeman was peering through a magic looking glass into our decade.

Well, not quite, since the particle collider is in Jupiter's orbit.

And there are other technological advances in "Forever Peace" that are way beyond our current state of technology (otherwise this wouldn't be science fiction). The most important of them, on which the premise of the book depends, is the concept of jacking, or brain-to-brain interfaces that allow people to exchange thoughts, emotions, memories, and all kinds of mental states. While this is nothing new in science fiction, this concept is explored more thoroughly in "Forever Peace" than I've seen in any other book (maybe I just don't read much? :-)). The book examines its impact on global scale (e.g. changing the way wars are conducted), and on the characters' personal lives. As the book goes on, the consequences of brain interfaces escalate beyond practical and into purely revolutionary. The main scientific innovation described in the book is also critical in resolution of the conflict on which the plot hinges. This is what I ideally expect from science fiction, and "Forever Peace" delivers.

The characters are interesting too. They cross typical gender, race, and occupation lines. There is a young black man who divides his time between teaching college physics AND fighting in the war against the "rebels". (He had the back luck to be drafted.) His girlfriend is a physics professor, a white woman 15 years his senior. Between the two of them and their friends, they are an interesting bunch. These are definitely some real, non-cookie-cutter people.

The only drawback of this book, in my opinion, that the plot arc takes too long to take off. It takes over a 100 pages for the main conflict to be set up. Not that those first 100 pages are boring -- they are full of interesting stuff that tells you a lot about the society the action takes place in. It's just at first you don't necessarily get a feeling that the book is going anywhere -- it's as if you are just watching characters living their lives.

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Future shock and awe

The decade since the publication of "Forever Peace" have, if anything, enhanced the validity and currency of its imagined tomorrows. Future wars are conducted from afar by "jacked-in" operators of disposable (but almost indestructible) "soldierboys"; the human operators are squirreled away in a safe zone while shock-and-awe campaigns target guerrilla rebels and inflict pitiless damage on innocent civilians. The soldiers are jacked in not only to their corresponding warbots but also to each other; feeling the emotions and thinking the thoughts of their fellow platoon members. Meanwhile, citizens of First World nations live luxuriously on rations provided by a welfare state and produced virtually cost-free by nanotechnology, work only to supplement their rations, entertain themselves on live broadcasts of continuous warfare featuring their favorite soldierboys, and rarely stray from gated communities because of the dangers from urban blight or religious kooks known as Enders.

Similar only in subject and inspired by his own experiences in the Vietnam War, Haldeman's "Forever War" (the predecessor to this novel) dealt thematically with the use of soldiers as cannon fodder by heartless, bungling military commanders; it was like "Catch-22" in its cynicism. "Forever Peace," however, deals with war's collateral damage, both the outgunned populations on the other side and the psychologically compromised "heroes" who begin to question their role in the all-too-easy slaughter.

The novel is, then, about empathy: empathy on the part of the soldiers for each other and on how empathy is the first casualty of war. It's on this theme that Haldeman establishes the storyline: scientists who win a military "contract to study empathy failures, [that is,] people who crack out of sympathy with the enemy," realize that this human "failing" could just as easily be used to fashion a utopia. And, on top of all this, another group of researchers plan to build a giant supercollider around Jupiter to perform experiments that might elucidate the beginnings of our universe--or of the next one.

War, terrorism, physics, nanotechnology, psychology, religious fundamentalism, utopianism, and an action-filled chase across the North American continent--Haldeman has bit off almost more than he can chew in a relatively short novel (and the jarring, alternating use of diary-like first-person narrative and textbook-like third-person omniscience sometimes enhances the kitchen-sink qualities of the story). But he somehow pulls it off. I found this novel just as satisfying as "Forever War," but for different reasons. On the one hand, the satire and themes of the earlier novel are far more powerful, while this book toes the line between allegorical optimism and touch-feely romanticism. On the other, the storyline of "Forever Peace" is more cohesive and gripping, and it is impressive how Haldeman connects all the subplots and loose ends in the book's quasi-apocalyptic closing chapters.

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Forever Peace is good but not great--read The Forever War

Forever Peace is the second book by Joe Handelman to win both the Hugo and Nebula awards. He also achieved this doubly prestigious honor before with his book The Forever War, which I have previously read and reviewed and greatly enjoyed.

Unfortunately, Forever Peace is not as well-written as The Forever War, although it is as inventive. That's part of the problem. There are two great ideas in The Forever War: the notion that some percentage of humans have the ability to be "jacked" so that all sensory input can be shared between two or more people AND the discovery that a long-running astrophysical experiment to recreate the Big Bang will actually destroy a significant portion of our Galaxy and there is a secret society that has infiltrated the Government that believes that it is God's will that the Universe be destroyed.

Either one of these ideas would have been enough to make a pretty decent sciemce fiction novel. However, in Forever Peace I think that Haldeman over-reaches and tries to include two ideas that really don't have much to do with each other. In general, I am a fan of sci-fi books that are brimming with ideas but there's just something ill-posed about the way the ideas in Forever Peace seem to unspool. I was quite surprised, because most reviews seem to think that it is at least as a good as The Forever War but I had difficulty finishing it (and was not really invested in the main character's well-being) which was not the case with The Forever War, which is really a collection of short stories and novellas that feature the same character.

Forever Peace and The Forever War are not really sequels, their similarities are in their author and they both are told from the first-person perspective of a soldier in aseemingly unterminable war. Forever Peace does not distinguish itself in a head-to-head cmparison between the two, but is still worth a try (after reading The Forever War).

OVERALL GRADE: B+.
IMPACT: B-.
IDEAS: A.
WRITING: B.

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It's okay...

...but I wasn't really thrilled with it. Some interesting concepts introduced, but that's a about all.

2043 A.D.: The Ngumi War rages. A burned-out soldier and his scientist lover discover a secret that could put the universe back to square one--not a terrifying prospect, but a tempting one. Featured on the "Locus" Recommended Reading list and selected by "Publishers Weekly" as one of the best books of the year.