The novel “The Forever War” by Joe Haldeman was published for the first time in 1974. It won the Hugo, Nebula, and Locus Awards as the best science fiction novel of the year.

In 1997, William Mandella is a college student when the war begins with the Taurans, the mysterious aliens humans encountered when they began traveling in interstellar space. Conscripted into the space force created to fight the Taurans, he’s trained, conditioned for war, and sent on a mission.

Along with the other soldiers, William Mandella embarks on an interstellar journey. Special space-time “shortcuts” allow fast travel from one point in space to another, but these are specific locations. From any of those locations, the journey is at sub-light speed, which means traveling for years, though subjectively, it’s much shorter due to time dilation.

Joe Haldeman was sent to fight in Vietnam, where he was wounded. He wrote about his experiences in the novel “War Year,” and later began to rework them in a science fiction framework in a series of stories that, in the end, formed “The Forever War.” The division into some short stories was due to the fact that the novel was originally published in the magazine “Analog” and only later as a book.

A portion of the novel, which recounts William Mandella and Marygay Potter’s experiences on Earth after the end of their first mission, was left out of the first edition and reinstated only several years later, when a new edition was published.

William Mandella’s story contains several autobiographical references. The protagonist’s last name is almost an anagram of the author’s name, and the name Marygay Potter resembles the author’s wife’s maiden name.

What’s truly important is that it’s the story of a stupid war fought by people conscripted and treated like tools. Mandella and the other soldiers are mentally conditioned and even drugged to be used in a war that is increasingly driven by economic interests.

William Mandella’s trips during the war take him into a future increasingly distant from his own time due to time dilation. From his perspective, technological advances are so fast that he and the other soldiers simply follow instructions on how to use the new weapons and equipment without really understanding how they work.

Even worse is the reaction caused by the social changes occurring on Earth while the troops are on the move. For the soldiers, all this creates a growing alienation that, especially in the case of William Mandella and the other soldiers who left during the 20th century, makes humanity itself increasingly alien.

War plans are made who knows where, far away in space and time, and have an impact that can literally last for centuries. It’s a situation in which William Mandella and the other soldiers who initially traveled with him are supposed to be a sort of elite unit composed of highly intelligent individuals, but, in the end, survival is a matter of luck, and promotions are earned precisely by surviving. Even for the ones who survive, there’s a growing sense of years of life stolen. All of this leaves no room for a certain rhetoric tied to the clichés about heroism.

Joe Haldeman’s style is dry in recounting the absurdity of war. There are moments of great intensity linked to battles, but also long periods of travel during which the protagonist can reflect on everything related to the war. There are the changes taking place in human society and his difficulty in keeping up to date. There’s the war economy, which significantly affects even the people who live on Earth.

Joe Haldeman imagined an interstellar war beginning in what for him was the near future. A few decades later, there are no aliens to fight, just stupid apes killing each other for the benefit of very few people. This is another reason why “The Forever War” is, in my opinion, a must-read novel regardless of genre labels. It’s available on Amazon USA, UK, and Canada.