Search Worlds Without End

An engaging tour through the work and life of one of America's great science fiction writers

Nebula and Hugo Award-winning author Joe Haldeman burst onto the literary scene with the hugely popular novel The Forever War, but his career also took off on the strength of his short fiction. This brilliant collection brings together examples of his science fiction as well as his writing on Vietnam--and reveals the inexorable connections between the two.

The works included in Vietnam and Other Alien Worlds are united by its title essay, in which Haldeman explains how his past informs his envisioned futures. One of these futures is a grouping of four stories from the Confederación universe, which includes his novels All My Sins Remembered and There Is No Darkness. An anthropological expedition goes awry as a research team's subjects become murderous, and trade negotiations fall apart, comically lost in translation. The collection closes with one of Haldeman's most affective works about Vietnam--the moving narrative poem "DX."

Vietnam and Other Alien Worlds proves to be an anthology as versatile and multifaceted as the author who wrote it.

Table of Contents:

• Introduction - essay
• Passages - (1990) - novelette
• A !Tangled Web - (1981) - novelette
• Seasons - (1985) - novella
• The Mazel Tov Revolution - (1974) - shortstory
• Vietnam and Other Alien Worlds - (1992) - essay
• Not Being There - essay
• Confessions of a Space Junkie - (1992) - essay
• War Stories - essay
• Photographs and Memories - essay
• Saul's Death - (1983) - poem
• Homecoming - (1990) - poem
• Time Lapse - (1989) - poem
• DX - (1987) - poem

At the end of the 21st century, many people believe the only real hope for humanity lies in the Worlds: 41 orbiting satellites housing half a million people. Though the creation of cheap fusion has undermined the Worlds as a source of solar energy, they still welcome many tourists and offer plenty of raw materials for export. For example, New New York is almost pure steel.

And, from that city comes Marianne O'Hara, a brilliant political-science student who has elected to spend a postgraduate year on Earth - where she unwittingly finds herself caught up in a group of fanatics looking to start another revolution in America. Even if it means the destruction of the planet.

The war that destroyed everything lasted a single day. After an initial nuclear strike, the Earth's population was further devastated by an insidious bioweapon targeting anyone above the age of puberty. Now most of what's left of human civilization gathers on New New York, one of the few orbiting Worlds that remain.

Monitoring the Earth below from the floating habitat, Marianne O'Hara searches for signs of life - and, in particular, for Jeff Hawking, her former lover, who survived the viral nightmare thanks to a biological anomaly that rendered him immune. But Jeff is not the sole surviving adult in this landscape of death, ruin, and feral children, and those who fled to safety underground are being seduced by a terrible new religion preaching blood and vengeance. The last war, it seems, is not over - and the last hope for preventing the final holocaust may be Marianne O'Hara.

The Earth is no more, an uninhabitable shell following the one-day war that obliterated the population. In the decades that followed, the surviving Worlds orbiting the dead planet have become the last refuge of humankind. With the discovery of a possibly habitable planet in a distant star system, ten thousand brave colonists are preparing to depart from New New York aboard the interstellar vessel Newhome. Among them is Marianne O'Hara, who will ultimately control the fate of what remains of the human race.

The momentous voyage is plagued from the start by ignorance and sabotage, and by the dark tenets of a nihilistic religion dedicated to ultimate destruction. But despite the many trials and tragedies, the spacefarers - and particularly Marianne and her loved ones - will be forced to endure. There is no turning back once the journey begins... for soon there will be nowhere left to return to.