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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   2674 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for October 6, 2024

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I would love to read The Forever War again, it's a fast one and really great. It gets compared with Starship Troopers a lot, and I think it wins out of the two for me.

I love Starship Troopers, and The Forever War was written partly as a rebuttal to how Troopers "glorifies war", so you'd think I should hate it, as an Ur-example of leftists hijacking something so they can update it with The Message, for Modern Audiences. But it's so much better as a rebuttal than most modern reboots of that type. It treats the theme as a necessary part of a good story but not a sufficient part, so it puts just as much effort into characterization and plot. It feels like (and AFAIK was) well-informed self-criticism by an insider of the culture being criticized, not ignorant cheap shots from an outsider. It treats its genre as a promise with conventions that it lives up to, not just an arbitrary color palette slapped onto a generic story. And even considered as a rebuttal to previous fiction or as a commentary on non-fiction events, it manages to avoid the typical minor failure of "so tenuous an allegory that it doesn't really contribute to the debate" and the typical major failure of "so heavy an allegory that it doesn't really stand on it's own", threading the needle perfectly. I personally prefer Troopers, but I'd still call Forever War the more proficient of the two.

I wish I could praise any more of Haldeman's work as much. I remember kind of liking Camoflague, and I think Forever Peace, but not enough to reread them, whereas Troopers wasn't even Heinlein's best Middle-Grade/Young-Adult book.

Well put. I also like that both books serve as fine novels even for those who don't typically read sci-fi (including myself). I'd feel comfortable recommending The Forever War to most readers since it's enjoyable on multiple levels that you described.

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