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Joe Haldeman – Forever Free

When Joe Haldeman won the Hugo award for his novel _Forever Peace_ in 1998, a lot of people were disappointed that the book wasn’t a sequel to his 1974 Hugo and Nebula award-winning classic, _The Forever War_. Both books have a similar thematic underpinning, though, and put across a strong anti-war message. As a Vietnam veteran, Haldeman is always at his best when he writes about his “core values”.

In _Forever Free_, he does return to the same characters he left behind in _The Forever War_: William Mandella and his wife Marygay. In _The Forever War_, the main characters are soldiers, fighting battles on distant worlds. Because of relativity, whenever they travel such interstellar distances, they also hop forward through time. Each time they return to Earth hundreds of years have passed, and they find society changed almost beyond recognition. Eventually, human society evolves into a group mind known as “Man”, and the war the soldiers had been fighting ends.

Between the two books, some twenty-odd years have now passed. Mandella and Marygay have settled down on the planet Middle Finger. They have a family, and live in a peaceful farming community. Life is hard (the planet spends most of its 6-year “year” in deep winter), but peaceful. Mandella and his fellow veterans, though, believe that Man (the group mind) is keeping the old humans around as a genetic backup for the human race, in case something goes wrong with Man as a species.

To Mandella, the society is stale. His life is stale. He doesn’t have confidence in the future of Man, and wants to do something about it. And if he can’t change the society itself, then he will escape from it. He and a group of other veterans come up with a plan to borrow an ancient spaceship, crank it up to relativistic speeds, and take a short-cut to the future. They want to come back in 40,000 years’ time to see how things will pan out.

So far, so reasonable. This is a fairly logical extension to the first book, and takes the ideas forward at a gentle pace. Haldeman sets up some interesting conflicts between Mandella and Marygay, who consider the society a dystopia, and their children, who think the opposite. The group mind of Man is initially willing to go along with the whole expedition idea, but puts up resistance later; this ultimately leads to a showdown in which the veterans are forced to steal the spaceship.

…And then it all goes a bit strange.

I don’t want to give too much away about the second half of the book, but it’s like Haldeman decided he’d had enough of the original plot, and threw it away in favour of something completely different. All of the interesting questions he sets up in the first half get dropped unanswered, and the emotional conflicts get rolled back to a previous state, as if they hadn’t happened at all. The characters are the same, but they’re in the middle of a bizarre and completely unexpected adventure. This new story doesn’t depend on the original characters in any way, and could have been set in any generic SF world–no need to place it in an established and well-loved environment. He introduces not one but _two_ dei ex machina, and then doesn’t do anything with them!

I’m baffled. It’s like a head-on collision between two different novels. The characters ultimately end up walking around in a bit of a daze.

What bothers me most is that Mandella and his fellow veterans to have no apparent stake in the outcome of the second part of the book. Why did Haldeman not choose characters upon whom the outcome would have a deeper (read: “any”) impact? I wanted to see the first part of the story brought to its conclusion!

I feel like this is a waste of a sequel, and I can’t help wondering if this book was more inspired by marketing forces than a genuine desire to explore the further story of William Mandella. Haldeman is a master writer, and he has written some of the best SF in the last quarter century. (In addition to his novel Hugos, he has also won numerous awards for his short fiction.) But although this book is unquestionably well written, I found the story terribly disappointing. Perhaps I had my hopes up too high.

_The Forever War_ is a hard act to follow. I wish Haldeman had left it to stand on its own.

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Faking it

One of the most entertaining shows on British TV at the moment has got to be Channel 4‘s Faking It.

In each episode, an ordinary person is given four weeks to become skilled enough in a different job to be able to “fake it” with the top professionals in that field. At the end of each episode, this person is placed up against these same top professionals in a contest. The contest judges aren’t told that an imposter is taking part until they’ve made their decision on who is the best.

This week, an Irish farm hand was taken to London, and trained to be a hair dresser. Although the judges thought his work was good, all of them picked him out afterwards as being the impostor. Last week, however, a burger-flipper and dish-washer was trained up to be a head chef, and given a team of kitchen staff to run in a coooking contest. Not only did the judges award him first place, but none of them guessed that he was the plant.

I find the show interesting not only because of the challenge the subject is given, but also because it gives a sideways-looking insight into the professions being targeted. It’s pretty cool.

Next week, they’re training someone to be a pro wrestler!

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The Arctic Circle moves South

We’re back home again in Edinburgh after five days away in London. Yesterday, we were walking around Hyde Park in shirts and light jackets (a bit chilly, but very pleasant nevertheless). Tonight, on our taxi ride back from the airport, it was snowing.

More about our time in London soon.

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Advanced weapons do not equate to good foreign policy

I haven’t been watching much news on TV lately. The endless rallying cries of western imperialism depress me. The relentless bait-and-switch propaganda makes me think that in times of crisis the media give up on critically questioning the government. (And I consider myself naive for having believed that they ever did.) And the continuous parade of utter stupidity just makes me downright angry.

Consider a program that was on the Discovery Channel yesterday evening. It was a supposedly in-depth look at how Western (i.e. US) forces are tackling the war on Afghanistan. (Yes, I meant to say “on” rather than “in”.) It featured an interview with John Gresham, a military researcher. I don’t have an exact quote, but what he said went something along these lines:

“These new smart missiles can target any point in the world, and they’re accurate to a within thirteen meters. Imagine what would happen if we could have placed a bomb right in the sleeping quarters of a Saddam Hussain, a Hitler, a Pol Pot ( names a series of other renowned figures). Don’t you think that would have an effect on their foreign policy?”

Bear in mind that I wasn’t paying huge amounts of attention to this show, and I’ve just taken his quote out of context. But–hello?

First of all, it’s all very well and good to feed in a set of co-ordinates, and watch the missile go boom right on top of them. But what happens if you’ve got the wrong coordinates by accident? What if your intelligence is wrong? The bomb may be smart, but it can’t tell the difference between a bunker and a school.

And secondly, what if terrorists had the ability to detonate a bomb in the middle of any city, at any time. Don’t you think that would affect our foreign policy? Oh, wait–they do have that ability. And it has affected our foreign policy. It’s caused us to go to war. So how can anyone think that holding foreign leaders to ransom for their good behaviour is a way of ensuring peace?

What a muppet.