I keep shaking my head as each act of the novel goes from,
Mandela 2005-2067
Or
Mandela 2187-3476
Or shit like that… The years just start zipping by the further Mandela and Potter get further away from home and deeper into the war. It feels like how a civilization like the Empire in Warhammer gets started, where the economy becomes solely focused on the war, and how time has no meaning as this war gets stretched and stretched into decades to centuries of conflict with this race of beings that was established from the very beginning to be not that hostile.
It’s such a great response to works like Starship Troopers. Though, I find it odd how Heinlein seems to LOVE Forever War, despite how it’s a direct indictment of everything Heinlein believes in.
One of the interesting and dated elements of the book is how gender and sexuality seem to change and pass Mandela by. This, I kind of have problems with. On the one hand, it drops really surprising early ideas of pronoun usage, with ‘they’ pronouns coming up. (This novel was written in the 70s) and how homosexuality becomes common place as the years pass, but we’re seeing the world through Mandela’s eyes, and it seems like he associates the changes in gender and sex as a continuation of how unrecognizable and crazy the future earth is. It comes off as a negative. Though, several characters in Mandela’s proximity seem to chastise him for his traditionalist views, with his lover Potter ever stating that, “This stuff was always here, so it’s you who needs to change, not the world.” Which I found interesting.
It seems like the author is challenging his own dated views on sexuality with his own work, or perhaps he’s trying to paint Mandela as an ‘everyman’ of the 70s to show how a normal human is changed in this sci-fi endless war. Either way, it doesn’t age very well, and it kind of puts a damper in the this story that I love very much.
Finished Rogue Protocol, the third book in the murderbot series. It’s still pretty good! If I wanted to get nitpicky I’d say it’s probably my least favorite of the three, but like i still read the entire thing in two sessions so it’s not like it wasn’t gripping
This is legitimately one of my favorite sci-fi novels of all time. It’s an incredible response to Starship Troopers.
The follow-up, Forever Peace, is also worth reading imo, but it’s not as good.
I think your read of the gender and sexuality stuff is pretty spot on, but personally, I think works need to have room for authors to explore and work through their own potentially bigoted views. The stuff you point out in Forever War kind of reads that way to me. But it also… was laughable? I remember laughing at it. Like, Haldeman’s views of gender and sexuality are so dated in that novel that when I read it I couldn’t help but laugh because some of it is absurd.
Yup! It completely changes the tone of the book, but not in a way that dragged it down for me overall because it just felt so… time capsule-y? I don’t want to dismiss the homophobia, but I’m still very much on the fence as to whether Haldeman himself was working through his own biases and reflected that in the character or whether he wanted us to read Mandela as a kind of “shithead out of time” character.
I just got to the part where Mandela meets the ‘asexual cyborg’ and the cyborg tells him, “Mandela, being straight is ILLEGAL on Earth now. You have to go to conversion therapy if you’re straight.”
I’m wondering if these represent bigoted views the author actually has, and if it represents the worries he has for the future, or if he’s making a commentary on barbaric gay conversion therapy.
It’s really hard to tell…
Edit:
Found this response to an AMA he gave that was interesting:
Sounds like his heart was in the right place, and he was trying to make commentary on the time and place he came from. But he recognizes how it could be considered dated now.
The Amateurs by Liz Harmer.
PINA (an Apple equivalent consumer electronics company) releases their new and last product, a portal that will take the user to any time and place they desire to be in the most. Humanity gradually vanishes, no one comes back, and civilization collapses.
It’s a post-civilization story mixed with a mystery of what the hell the Ports really are. Also a character study of two different people still left on earth.
I think if the characters weren’t so well written and the idea of the Ports weren’t so intriguing I might have bounced because I’m completely burnt on post-civ narratives at this point.
Maybe burnt is the wrong word, more like… depressed at the snowballing inevitability… even in our imaginary worlds, everything ends.
Anyway, was a good read, got much more interesting as the story shifts to PINA campus.
Just about to finish up Chuck Wendig’s Wanderers - basically an apocolyptic Stand-like tale but set in the social media era. I’m generally enjoying it and it’s paced pretty well, and he does a good job - mostly - voicing his various POV characters.
But the ending is dragging a bit and I’m getting the sense he’s setting up for a sequel, a big readerly no-no for me personally.
This sounds so good that I immediately got a sample sent to my iPad. Imagine my surprise when I started reading and found myself in the midst of a story about a guy who wakes up after a golfing accident and discovers he’s got the golfing ability of a professional.
I haven’t finished Forever War yet, but I started the first Eisenhorn book, Xenos.
So far, I’m enjoying it. People aren’t kidding about the disposability of human life in this franchise. In the first chapters, Eisenhorn is already involved with a genocide of 12,000 people. Instead of ANY kind of punishment, it’s hand waved as, ‘just a part of Inquisitor business.’
I’ve been wanting to read something Half-Lifey… Specifically about secret military experimental bases and such.
Has anyone read the Laundry Files? It looks like its very focused on comedy:
I’ve read most of them. I don’t know, they are kind of a guilty pleasure? They are kind a Brit humor take on cosmic horror that doesn’t entirely let the comedy undermine the horror. If you like the idea of Silicon Valley/The Office/IT Crowd crossed with Cthulhu you’ll have a good time.
They get less funny and more serious as the series goes on. I think the author realized at some point there’s only so far you can go with “ha-ha isn’t it hilarious that you need to file 17 forms in triplicate to get the budget to save the world”, and like a good table top game went with where the world building had taken him.
Well, also, they move away from each book being a parody (loosely) on a particular author of spy thriller (Deighton, Fleming, Price for the first three), to being a thing in themselves. I think Stross has written a lot about how he’s shifted the series (and, in later books, the protagonists) in order to accommodate the way in which the setting has evolved. I do worry that, (mildly spoilery) with the state of the world in the later books, Stross’ is still going to write himself into a Lovecraftian ending kind of corner (this is very much a setting which takes seriously the “inevitable loss” aspects of cosmic horror) in terms of the available plot developments to him.
For UK-based readers, there’s still some comedy in the writing-around-not-naming the obvious references to various cabinet ministers in later books, too…
Immediately after/while reading this I got into a mental tangent about Cyberpunk, the genre in general/what it means to me/how it exists now BUT
This is not a Cyberpunk novel, despite some serious simularities/homage to William Gibson books.
Some examples:
Attention to detail in technology, food, clothing; cultural artifacts in general. Poly-Culturalism, professionals working for corporate interests.
Takes place in the near future, and most of the tech seems like the logical extension of what exists right now. Nothing particularly flashy, but things that make the lives of the wealthy more filled with wonder or luxury.
Except the technology around the main theme, which is the idea of empathy. Empathy enhanced by natural mutation or chemistry. Flash backs to Gibson again, and the idea of being a professional pattern recognizer. In this case, a more humanistic approach? The main character is a “Em-Tracker” someone who can sense future trends through heightened empathy.
Anyway, it’s a good book even though I feel more wrapped up than usual in what I brought into it. Notice very little explanation of the books plot. Could go on, but I’ll just say it’s wierd for me to realize that Cyberpunk is now a future that only existed in the past, along the lines of Buck Rodgers and Lucky Starr Space Explorer.
Not as simple as that of course because it’s a genre that easily allows aspects of itself to be exported piecemeal and in fact it’s kind of fitting…
I’m about halfway through The Calculating Stars, a sci-fi novel that won a Hugo award. It’s about how a meteor strikes the US in the early 1950s, and the fallout is set to kill the planet. Therefore the only hope is to come together and take to spaceeeeee. Our main character Elma is a pilot and scientist, but when it turns out that no women have been chosen as astronauts, she and a band of other women set out to change that.
The book is fine so far? I think my biggest issue is that it’s just so “level 1” about everything. It’s very rah-rah smash the patriarchy vibe to it. It doesn’t feel super self congratulatory, but the concepts are a bit too “ah 1950’s patriarch, you say women are too fragile, but you’d be wrong, women CAN do anything men can do!” Its just a little too easy imo.
I might be a little harsh on it. It’s diverse (though I haven’t seen much lgbt+ rep so far) and I don’t want to be the dude who is way to over critical of this stuff. I’ll continue to read it and give y’all an update when I’m done!
Finished Infinite Detail by Tim Maughan.
Intertwines the before and after of a catastrophic global event, in this case the internet ceasing to exist.
It’s an equal part of pointing out the shittiness of a algorithm controlled future, and what a disaster it would be if the system was abruptly taken down.
I’d like to point out that the end would be a video game I would totally play, that is finding and destroying fallout style shelters full of preppers, the game we thought that far cry 5 sequel might be but totally wasn’t.
