Peace and War
The last few days I read this ‘trilogy’ by Joe Haldeman - consisting of his famous book ‘The Forever War’, it’s sequel ‘Forever Free’ and its companion ‘Forever Peace’. They’re well worth a read - especially if your a fan of military science-fiction.
I didn’t read ‘the Forever War’ this time as I had read it fairly recently - a few months ago anyway, thing is though I’m now tempted to go back and do so… Simply because it’s that good. But the other two novels are pretty good too - ‘forever free’ is fairly short and in many ways reads like a short story, especially in its scope. Though the end of it takes the book to fairly extreme places. Despite this it is still a good book and the ‘Deus Ex Machina’ elements are… acceptable I guess.
‘Forever Peace’ is probably the more interesting of those two though. In many ways there are elements that will relate to modern readers best of all three books. While ‘the Forever war’ dealt with a society that was changing so quickly that depending on when you left you may have had a hard time accepting the ‘next generation’ as even being human, removed from the Vietnam context that element doesn’t have the same kick it used to. However, the idea of a war being fought between the ‘First world’ and the ‘Third world’ with the first world fighting from a distance and only not winning outright owing to a lack of desire for casualties (at least on our side) it will be disturbingly relateable to those of us around today.
Anyway, you can get the trilogy edition of the books for about 13quid so….