The Forever War

This book is quite a strong voice against war. It speaks of the futility and the misunderstanding at its root. It also speaks rather vividly of its fruit, its needless death, not just of enemy and friendly life, but of the psyche and the moral destruction. By moral destruction, I do not mean the destruction of morals, though that too seems to come about, as a side effect of the social shifts that take place over the course of centuries. More, I mean the numbing of the moral sensibilities, the breeding of cynicism.

If Starship Troopers was a tract on the value of militarism in the pursuit of unified identity, then this is the other side of the argument. Distance has always been the logistical downside of war. Interstellar distance takes logistical inconvenience to Einsteinian proportions. They and the speeds necessary make "lifetime" a quite flexible problem.

Haldeman takes the romance out of war and replaces it with grit and guts... literally, entrails. He shows the stark blandness of the military machine. The emptiness of space reflects the much bigger emptiness of bureaucratic inertia. The sadness of death cannot be extracted from war. No obedience to orders or sense of duty can mitigate the psychic trauma.

I recommend the Forever War for anyone who has a strong stomach and can face the inevitability of human decay. The non-technician will have trouble with the relativity behind the long durations necessitated by Einstein's theory, but if the reader can accept it at face value, even through suspension of disbelief, then they may see the powerful statement the book makes.