I have only been reading science fiction books for about four years. I watched many television shows and movies, but I did not read books from this genre. Our connection to the genre of science fiction probably all begins for most of us who are 40+ years old with the original Star Trek, Lost in Space, and Star Wars. All the books that I have read in these recent years have been new books that are less than ten years old. The Forever war is the first book that I read that is decades old.
The author won the Hugo, Locus, and Nebula awards. The book was written in the 1970s. It is around 50 years old. There are events and situations in the story that are familiar and are now ordinary things to occur in the science fiction genre novels of the present. It may be that it was a groundbreaking novel when it was published and that it is the basis for many of the familiar things we see today. It seems that there are a lot of things presented here that may have been new and novel at the time that are now taken for granted and accepted as normal in the present.
One example is the idea of time dilation. As the character travels at faster than light speed to his various destinations he finds that the time he spends traveling may appear as a normal passage of time to his perception and perspective, but in the reference point of people outside his ship, that may be on a planet, there are decades or hundreds of years that are passing.
In the story there was war and there were a lot of people dying during training and during actual combat. War and the military are not pretty and there is certainly a lot of frustration in many settings. Mistakes, accidents, or foolish moments of behavior could also lead to death depending on the situation. There are accidents during training, accidents during conflict, soldiers that sometimes do not follow orders as expected and put others at risk, bad feelings between different ranks in the military, people avoiding the conflict or going AWOL. These are things that happen in the real military and in conflict situations.
In the story, it seemed as if the enemy was unknown, and later it seemed as if the enemy was a civilization of near-mindless automatons that might have simply swarmed out into space. It was not clear to me who the enemy people were, but near the end, they were presented as being very powerful.
I read this book for a book discussion a few years ago. Other people in my discussion group mentioned the Vietnam War. It is a perfectly natural thing to associate with this story that I did not think of because to me it might have been any war. At the time I wondered why they brought up this specific war thinking to myself that maybe it was brought up because I was in the United States and possibly everyone else in the discussion group was from England, but that was probably just a moment of me thinking I am the center of the universe. I read a little about the author and this book later that day and most certainly the discussion about Vietnam was probably because the author wrote the story as the Vietnam War was still in progress. I also learned that the author was including some of his experience of that war.
The story also presents a few topics that illustrate social and environmental concerns of the present. The population of earth in the story had reached nine billion and there was a need to bring that under control. There were problems with managing resources and equitable distribution on earth.
The problem of population and resources produced an unusual or unexpected solution. The cultural perception of homosexuality has changed over the decades. In the story the context surrounding the idea of homosexuality was interesting and peculiar in that it was an unexpected, and I suppose practical solution, that was offered and encouraged as a solution to a problem that the world faced and needed to resolve. The population of earth had to be brought under control and homosexuality was the solution in this story.
The two main characters, who had returned decades later due to time dilation, seem to have found that solution to be disagreeable. Later in the story after the two main characters reenlisted in order to return to a situation that may have been familiar to them, the main male character found himself as leader of a military grouping where most or all under his command were homosexual soldiers who seem to have found his heterosexuality as disagreeable. I appreciate the culture shock the main character may have felt regarding the changes to society in the time that he was gone.
It did leave questions in my mind as to whether the author may have thought homosexuality was genetic or if it was a cultural preference of a particular society. I think in the story the world governments were encouraging people to adopt this lifestyle. Over the decades I have occasionally heard viewpoints that it is the way a person is born and at other times that a person can choose. The opinion, awareness, and education of the public on this matter may have been confused and undecided in the 1970s.
I thought it was a good story. It presented a few things that were concerns during those times and that are still relevant today. It brought some social issues and presented aspects that could represent moments of actual military history and interactions among soldiers and the populace that are probably still common today. There are additional books that are sequels of sorts and are considered to make up what has been called the Forever War series. I am curious about these books and will look for them in my local public library. I may also reread this book as a second reading can sometimes provide other insights or correct misinterpretations.