It’s so Army… for me it was being sent to Wales on a kayaking course for a week. When I got back I found out I was scheduled for a dentist appointment on the third day of the course. I was charged fifty pounds as a reprimand because the dentist didn’t check that the ENTIRE regiment was in the same country. So army.
Joe Haldeman freely admitted he vastly accelerated technological progress in "Private Mandala" so he could have (just barely) Vietnam veterans (and in one case, a Korea Vet) serve as officers in the UNEF's interstellar war.--that was the officer persona Haldeman was familiar with and it provides a pretty solid departure point for the sociological changes throughout the saga. , Right from the start, we have Boomers vs what we now call Generation X (and in William's case, a child of hippies). If you suspend disbelief in having star travel in the 1990s, the reader sees Mandala and Potter dealing with anachronisms from another era, and all too quickly (as within 3 years of their subjective lives) become anachronisms themselves. "The past is a different country..."
It is one of the nightmares that technology has forced upon us. Three hundred years ago, each generation changed really very little from the previous. Teenage rebellion wasn't a thing. There was continuity in culture and traditions. A boy, as soon as he could waddle on his own feet, would waddle after dad working on their plot of land. While their daughters would swarm around mom, as they were mending clothes, washing clothes, and tending to their vegetable garden. My grandfather faithfully watches State news. He has done so since he was a boy. Up until the 90s, Norway only had one TV channel. I consider everything he sees to be villainous propaganda. While he sees the internet as nothing but a type-writer with jargon within it. Anything I say he immediately claims to be Russian propaganda. The past is not a different country. It is a different planet. It is not that they do different thing there. It is the fact that they are, at the core, different.
I'm not sure we can say that teenage rebellion wasn't a thing. Certainly not in the way it manifests today, but I think most wars are made possible in no small part by young men wanting to get the hell off the farm. We've gained things and lost things to be sure. Whether we came out ahead in the exchange remains to be seen.
@@feralhistorianOld men complaining about youth these days is as old as, at the very least, the Ancient Greece. Could be even older, but then, we do not have the written evidence for that.
@@feralhistorianPeople in their teens rebelled, yeah, but there's a difference between the newly-minted adults of yesteryear and the extended adolescence of today's First World.
Weird, because the Bright Youth People for example, existed all the way back in the 1920s, when your grandfather might himself have been a teenager. Ever heard of the Blackboard Jungle? Your grandfather’s generation did exactly what teenagers do today, and I do mean the worst way.
Pretty much any modern war/proxy war US leads is just for that. For example the current war in ukraine is just for the sake of having a war in europe. War like that in a strategic position causes massive social and economic consequence for the region which has been reflected in the massive economic downturn in EU countries who US has forced pretty much at gun point to join then in backing ukraine or into NATO at cost to their economies. Meanwhile its good business after all everyone is "sending weapons to ukraine" and that means if they are sending theirs then they need to replace those stocks and who are the biggest suppliers to europe? DING DING its US and Sweden. BOOM again war for the sake of war is good for the military industrial complex and the neocons. Ofc thats me simplifying that, if you want a full very in depth lecture on the topic look at the retired German general Haral Kujat's lecture(there is both translated and dubbed versions on YT) really digging deep into the real background of this conflict and logic from both the military , political and economic background from the US perspective that tells you a lot you won't get from news or military dramatubers.
@@cropathfinder I know I'm replying to a relatively old comment but I always have this question on my mind when I see talking points like this; You realize it's Russia who invaded Ukraine with tanks and guns right? Not America. You seemed to demonize American involvement without mentioning about that fact that's it's Russian missiles landing in Ukrainian cities.
The Forever War and Starship Troopers are two sides of each coin, some represents the horrors of war and the isolation towards society, the other represents the greater insight of being part of the army.
One is about a society built by soldiers and steered by them Because the only only way to be a higher up in ST is to be a former soldier FW is a society built by politicians and corps where everyone is eventually reduced to a pawn and is to eventually become fuel for the "society"
Hell the federation wasn't even the ones that shot first technically It was some mormons that against the advise of everyone settled in an area where a bunch of bugs live The war escalates because the pseudo arachnids can't understand that humans are individualistic and aren't wholely united Also they chuck a meteor the size of a country to Buenos Aires so that's a giant form of escalation
I bought this book when I was 13 thinking it would be a cool sci-fi action book. Boy, was I wrong - and I didn't really understand it until I re-read the book last year, 15 years after the first read. Great book and great analysis!
That point about becoming the enemy you fight was devastating. I recently had a conversation with a friend about the old propaganda of the Cold War about the USSR, how it could do nothing right, how it was a top down bureaucratic nightmare full of bad ideas that get pushed through because nobody is allowed to say no, how corrupt it was, how it was vulnerable to being misled by nonsensical scientific theories that would have devastating economic and industrial consequences, and how we've basically become all of those things. People think when I make that arguments that its some paranoid right wing fantasy about the return of the red scare but really its less about neo-communism and more about how people's relationship with collectivism seems to have changed as a whole for the worse.
@@feralhistorian The Diary of Pitirim Sorokin is pretty telling in this. In 1917, He was a professor at Saint Petersburg University and a member of the Socialist Revolutionary Party. He pushed for the revolution in the classroom. He saw the disaster that the revolution brought. So he fled to the United States. Where he went and became a professor. The amounts of Soviet academics that pushed for hell, then fled said hell, just to promote that same hell in their new home, is staggering. It is certainly all the proof I need to believe in the demonic. And one of FDR's brilliant ideas as part of the New Deal, was to give these people free money to continue writing their pamphlets, books, and articles. But hey what do I know. I consider Teddy Roosevelt to be the first Marxist President of America. So there is that. edit: typo
"Forever War" is my number 1 favourite book. It has so many levels on which it is mind-expanding - the drastic effects of relativistic travel, the despair of a conscripts life, the futility of pointless wars. I have read it about five times and found a new perspective to look at the story each time.
Thank you for your excellent content....my wife and I have been bingeing your commentaries for the last couple days and getting a great deal out of it.
After listening to your book summary, I have a very strong interest in reading this book. The premise sounds fascinating, as I also see the parallels with today's world. Thank you for introducing me to this book.
Your presentations are amazing. I remember this book, but the way you portray it gives it another dimension to think about. Your background looks like Red Dead Redemption 2.
This video makes me wonder if you've read and what your analysis of Stephen Baxter's Xeelee Sequence books would be. A large part of the series focuses on a similar idea, humanity getting into an endless war that slowly takes control of human civilization and changes into something inhuman. I had heard of the Forever War books but didn't know much about them, this video definitely puts them on the list of books I eventually want to read.
I'd be interested on your thoughts on "The High Crusade" by Poul Anderson. It's not your usual dystopian/militaristic theme, but nonetheless I'd like to hear what you think.
@@feralhistorian It was actually filmed by a European company, but I have heard the adaptation was absolutely terrible. The book screams for a fun worthy movie, that could become a beloved film for many people.
As deep as the message is in this book, the next two makes it feel like a small puddle next to the challenger deeps. I have all 3 bound together into a tomb entitled "peace and war" and to read it is a complete mind fuck.
i read that book as a kid in 2002 in highschool, i still recommend it to this day. it was a very good book but also sad because you could clearly see at times the mc felt like he was a relic of a long dead era and didnt belong there
I loved the "three World Wars" line. It's one of several great jokes from the last few weeks, along with the Chuckie III and dick tips comments from the Kings episode.
Great video. I read the book in college and thought the conclusion of the book was that only egalitarian hive mind communism would save us. Because MAN had a presumptious superiority complex to him that seemed justified by the plot and even the tone of the prose. Even if that communal cloned hive mind society seems eerie and dystopian to us, (because it is) that society was in fact morally superior to the individual based humanity of the past. Its also what ussured in peace not only for "human" civilization if you can still call it that, but in the cosmos as well. Not only that but the cloned hive mind society is rather magnanimous and humble and is what esnures Mandella can have a happy ending with his war waifus. Also the war creating instruments that finally over threw capitalism in a cosmic dialectic is a pretty marxist thing as I understand it. I still loved the book and it had a fantastic portrayal of relativistic space warfare i only seen similarly portrayed (but not as well) in Enders Game. Forever war is overall a great book with fantastic reflections even if I dissagree with the conclusion.
It was a really interesting view on how the world would progress over hundreds of years. It reminds me of the future speculative fiction of the turn of the 20th century.
I first read the book 45 years ago when I was 15. l did understand a bit of it then as I have military family and Vietnam had just wrapped up. I eventually got to meet Haldeman; a few times actually. He signed the copy of the book that I bought back in1979. His brother Jack did some work with the agriculture department at the University of Florida so Joe would come into town often and occasionally would sign books at Novel Ideas in Gainesville. I enjoyed the book, and am a bit astonished that some of his 'predictions' came to pass but he's no PKD (lol).
Another excellent video. Very inciteful and interesting. The criminal lack of subscribers, likes, and views isn't understandable to me (same for youtube"s inability to provide proper notification when you upload). Still patiently waiting for your first 40k video. May I suggest a starting place? The Night Lords Trilogy. I know it isn't one of the usual suggested starting places, but I feel it's still one of the best.
I geuinely think a hive-mind is the most horrifying thing that could possibly be brought into existence. The idea of being denied the most fundamental privacy of your own mind in favor of being essentially mindraped into being a cell in some greater organism that is what really has agency in the world is such a repugnant concept that I can’t see anyone supporting except for the most demented individuals who would want to be the centre on which such a system spins.
My bad dreams were of two kinds, those about spectres and those about insects. The second were, beyond comparison, the worse; to this day I would rather meet a ghost than a tarantula. As Owen Barfield once said to me, ‘The trouble about insects is that they are like French locomotives - they have all the works on the outside.’ The works - that is the trouble. Their angular limbs, their jerky movements, their dry, metallic noises, all suggest either machines that have come to life or life degenerating into mechanism. You may add that in the hive and the ant-hill we see fully realised the two things that some of us most dread for our own species - the dominance of the female and the dominance of the collective. - From the book "Surprised by Joy" by C.S Lewis.
@@boobah5643 I am quoting CS Lewis. It's a fear. In Britain, no insects, other than ticks, would be dangerous. And yet, people are afraid of them. Then to me, personally, I got ghosts / spirits on my farm. But as a Puritan, spirits floating about doesn't bother me much. Other than the fact that my entire region seems to carry a curse of disease, both mental and physical. Just on my farm alone, two people have gone insane from two different families in the past 50 years. They cleared this swamp after WW2 here in Norway. And since then, every single one of the five farms here have struggled. And when I had pigs, I saw shadow people pretty much every day. Or rather, a shadow man would be walking around, seeing him move regularly at the corner of my eye. Everyday feeling the sensation that someone stood within a few yards of me, watching me. You get used to it. As belief in specters I already have. But even so, as a Puritan, I would have already known that there is all sorts of stuffs going on the world that is beyond nature. As a people, we have always known that there is stuff beyond nature. It's only in recent decades that they decided otherwise. The silly gooses our scientists are. Pretty arrogant too, as a Scientist studies nature, and then for them to claim that there is nothing beyond it. I've always found that to be a pretty arrogant assumption.
A hivemind is essentially a single organism. No individual in the book is forced into a hivemind, the hivemind is born onto itself. There is no one to be 'mindraped'
I hope to recommend to you Fenrille Series by Christopher Rowley. And if you do not actively dislike fantasy, Glen Cook -- The Black Company books of course, but The Dread Empire books are not bad. The Silver Spike is a good near self-contained starter for The Black Company.
I read this book, oh, 20 years ago. I got it as a suggestion that it was similar to Starship Troopers, though it was, it was also vastly different. I thought it was a bold and out of the box idea with one of the best endings, right up there with Starship Troopers.
Great review of a book I never plan to read again. When I was 20, I thought it was too nihilistic and depression. I still feel that way about it being depressing but now it's because the misanthropic story feels too accurate in its predictions of culture and politics. I have similar problems re-reading 1984.
My best friend in College would NOT SHUT UP about this book! LOL I have a copy he gave me, and one of these days I will get around to reading it! But I think his analysis would agree with your own. I think the reason I put off reading it, is because I naively want to maintain some semblance of optimism about the future. Deep down, I know better... (Sigh)
I read that book in the very early 90’s after the Army, I saw the primitive political correctness then and so understood where the author was going with the “evolution of society “. I was constantly siding with the fewer and fewer Old Timers as the story progressed and welcomed the ending I was hoping for and was relieved to see it so . I still have the book , along with many others that one should not have anymore, saving them for my granddaughters when the are old enough, along with other items... the song Silent Running comes to mind when I think about what they will bear witness too so I will prepare them as best I can. Thank you for covering this great not so well known work of ... fiction ???
Nothing bad in the book was caused by the social changes. It was caused by the war. A war which only ended after the most extreme social changes, that of the clones.
Here's the thing - even if most of humanity has stagnated in the worse way possible, even leading to a singular 'Man', this husk of a 'civilization' will quickly be overshadowed by the breeder planets themselves, especially since they are apparently populated by millennia-old veterans that have likely mastered more skills than anyone else and are now giving birth to a new generation that will make its way in the world. Sure, the old system has more resources, for a time, but if the original humanity is stagnant, the new one being birthed on those breeder worlds will not be. The people there will seek power, status, and fulfillment. That will inevitably lead them to develop new technologies and new ways of thinking that, in time, are likely to outperform whatever cobwebbed advantages old humanity had. The fact that the singular Man does not recognize the threat of the breeder worlds leads me to believe that Man is doomed to fall to the true spirit of humanity reasserting itself and crushing all opposition as it grasps towards the stars anew.
**** you sir Just because I posted that and then realized that somebody that reads this will need more context. That is a direct quote from the book that very directly relates to the commentary in this video. Additional note, UA-cam has a problem with one of the seven words you can't say on television today.
Hey, have you read Storm of Steel or any of Ernst Junger’s work? Storm of Steel particularly is a really good book on his time as a German volunteer in the Great War.
Storm of Steel of is one of those books I've been meaning to read for my entire adult life and somehow haven't gotten around to. Think I'll grab a copy now.
@@feralhistorianErnst Junger is a masterful writer. Storm of Steel is a fun youthful jaunt of his experiences in the first world war, but he really shines when he starts looking at systems and the relationship we have within said systems. After Storm of Steel, I recommend reading The Worker, The Forest Passage, and lastly Eumeswil. His creation of the anarch archetype would make for a great video lecture on your part. I also recommend his brother Friedrich Junger's The Failure of Technology: Perfection Without Purpose.
I actually did not enjoy this book at all. I've never understood the fascination with it but to each their own I suppose. Your breakdown of is great however and I thoroughly enjoyed the "everyone is gay" part lol. Chefs kiss
With that conclusion makes me believe that America is becoming Brazil each year: A Nation without a true a indentity, governed by corrupt beurocrats and Oligarchs... a bleak destiny indeed
@@nobodyherepal3292 Scotland just passed a law to take away free speach. Ireland did also. Australia is about to do it. The lefties in charge of Germany right this second are trying to make it illegal to support any party but theirs. The American democrats are encouraging all those things and the department of homeland security is now watching what gamers say in chat rooms. Microsoft says all future "female" characters in games must have clothing covering them from head to toe and their faces must be uglified and androgynous. Chinese boats are hitting bridges and the president is making the taxpayers pay for it. Yes, I spent 20 years in but would never defend this country now. In fact as far as I am concerned all those assigned female gender at birth should be replaced by those who have been assigned male gender at birth in sports and locker rooms.
@@DogeickBateman why would anyone who believes in the first, second and fourth amendments and capitalism and meritocracy and wanting America to stop spending money overseas and having a secure border support what America is becoming?
America has a to me troubling propensity of becoming eggsackly what it once furiously fought against. As Winston Churchill once famously expressed: "America will do the right thing, but not before it has exhausted the alternatives.". The current state of the US is very much an affirmation of this statement. America is facing a fork in the road and the choices are; a road to continue towards democracy and freedom, or one that leads to a future that is historically eerily reminiscent of that the Roman Empire and its demise. Glorious for the moment and destined to ruinous oblivion in whatever term that escapes that moment. My instinct tells me to expect this to happen and see democracy snuffed out in favour of military-industrial profits and ideological exertion of power and control. I will resist.
Was the war based on a lie, or a misunderstanding/failure to communicate? I dont remember - was there a deliberate falsehood/deception, or just the reaction to an implacable, uncommunicative enemy?
Near the end, the book specifically states that the war was "begun on false pretenses and only continued because the two races were unable to communicate." It then goes on to explain that it was launched based on "laughably thin" evidence because a war would benefit the military-industrial-complex of the time. But it's all tacked on at the end, almost like he forgot to mention it earlier.
Enjoyed your analysis of the book and your thoughts regarding modern America which is slowly walking the path to right wing fascism and eventual Oligarchy.
I think there's a great 8-10 episode series that could be made from Forever War. HBO would probably do it well. Netflix maybe. Amazon would bugger it all up.
I read the serialization in Analog when it first came out. I guffawed at the refs to Viet Nam(US involvement had just ended); but the total ignorance of 'Despise not thine Enemy' and 'Know thine Enemy' made the finale inevitable. Sadly, the Genetic diversity that was kept in the book is being eroded in reality.
might be the cynic in me but that last bit about wanting the US to be the good guys smacks of someone who bought into the "American Myth" that best showcased by our "manifest destiny" in with which we legitimized our betrayal, manipulation and exploitation of the Native American tribes followed by the rest of our external fiddling with banana republics and messing with the democratic processes of other countries. We have never been the good guys at best we have been the least bad guys, an other perfect example of that would be how impressed and taken aback the nazis where with our racism which they later took a step further but the best bit is after we sent bodies to help end that war once we where directly bothered by it, we kept on being the racist nation we have always been. GIs that were people of color where denied the heros welcome their white fellows where drowned in, instead they got told to sit in the back of buses or denied loans and jobs they earned by bleeding for the very culture that now remembered they werent white.
I heard about The Forever War as a young teen, but didn't get my hands on a copy until I was in my 20's, and already a disabled veteran in my own right. I found the book to be... Extremely disappointing. It's exactly what a cynical mind would expect to see produced by a Vietnam conscript, in all the worst ways. First, the author attempts to portray military conscription as trending towards taking the most intelligent and capable from society to power an ever more complex war machine. As a commentary, this is flatly wrong, and anyone who paid a lick of attention to military technology would know this. All modern militaries follow one of two form factors for infantry technology: either 1) build the weapon or armor system in whatever way works, and focus on teaching soldiers to use that single system and no other, or 2) Find something common to the experience of the vast majority of potential soldiers, and build the system with a form factor that will use the pre-existing cultural skill to make training easier and faster. This doesn't require highly intelligent recruits - on the contrary, it assumes that most front line infantry consists of people who could barely pass compulsory education. Second, the author made a habit of skipping plot in order to get to social commentary. Descriptions of government systems and social programs go on for paragraphs and pages, setting up scenes through exposition and worldbuilding. And then, the scene itself passes so fast that a reader can almost miss it. The dialogue is scant, and mostly exists to demonstrate the punchline of some political point. Finally, the blatant generational arrogance. The Mandala character is typical of what I see in Vietnam veterans: everyone before the Baby Boomers are stupid, heartless barbarians, and everyone in subsequent generations are morally and socially bankrupt, and their intellect is only held up because of advancements in educational technology. The author, for all of his real world experience, demonstrates no understanding of historical trends anywhere in the book. Historically, powerful militaries and their governments have grown from either a virtuous or tenacious seed, flourished into imperial glory, and then decayed into a form of advanced backwater society before disappearing completely as a people and culture. Our current western civilization shows no sign of being any different from these trends, but Haldeman missed... All of that. So much commentary, with so many thoughts, but all of it is flash in the pan. A real disappointment.
Good points all. I didn't get the impression that Haldeman was saying that conscription at the time takes the best and brightest, since obviously it was slanted the other way with various college and vocational exemptions. Rather that it was a "what if they drafted rich people too" kind of commentary. Simplistic but not entirely baseless. Like UNEF is a darker version of Star Trek's Federation, where everyone going into space has to be brilliant because they could encounter anything. But yeah, it's more Haldeman's commentary than a story. Every few years I hear someone ask why no one ever made a movie from "Forever War" . . . Because it would be a janky piece of cinema that would be marketed as sci-fi action only to confuse and annoy the people that showed up based on that. --- You make an interesting point regarding form factor for infantry weapons. I was working for SIG back when the XM5 trial was still going on (I was on the optics side, had nothing to do with the design of that rifle) and one of the team there was really impressed by the Textron design, from an engineering perspective. I argued that if the Army picked anything it would be the SIG design, because it's the closest to what they already have. Chonky-M4 wins over weird polymer-cased ammo with moving chambers and all that other weird shit it was doing. I think the choice of the SIG design was mostly due to the factors you mention, minimal retraining of current personnel and some cultural familiarity with AR-style controls. But the further you get from infantry, the more specialized everything seems to get. Growing up driving tractors may have helped American and Russian tank drivers in WWII, but not so much today.
@@feralhistorian - the XM-4 project was wild, from what I've read. The optics were some of the best things to come out of the whole program, at least in terms of general adoption. I wish I could take credit for the form factor discussion, but really it was mentioned in an article I read a while ago about the XM-4 project. It resonated with me, since the M-67 frag grenade is specifically built to resemble a baseball because most Americans have thrown one of those. So I did more reading, and yeah, Americans adopt form factors that are common to the American experience in some way because it makes learning the system easier. Other countries adopt whatever they want, but then design all of their training around teaching their soldiers those specific systems, and not worry about generalizations until advanced training at some future point. Different schools of thought, but both are developed for the least common denominators of society. - I'd like to say that I generally agree with your review of the book. Your points were well chosen, and it's clear from the video that you have your own, strong thoughts and opinions on the matter, which you kept to a minimum. That's uncommon in reviews of books like this, so bravo! The book itself is... Decent. Haldeman is a good writer. He's no Asimov, but he's at least a Dickson, lol. Personally, I think The Forever War is mostly just him processing his experiences and emotions, which is honestly fine. I don't think I'd ever feel comfortable trying to publish such a book, but to each their own. I was just personally disappointed with it. I'd heard good things from trusted people about the speculative fiction in it, and had been interested to see how the author was going to manage such a monumental span of time and advancement. A thousand years, with a continual narrative! But, it's really just 20-ish years, broken up into three or four major sections, all following a single culture stuck in Cold War-style advancement. It's okay. Could be better. As an outlet for the author's military trauma, I sincerely hope it helped.
This book had me intrigued until I heard the plot point that everyone is gay in the future. It’s lazy, bigoted Boomer shorthand for “moral decay” and its disappointingly endemic in spec-fic of this era.
@@thehistorian1232 - As a general rule, I agree with you. There is A LOT of spec fic from the later 20th century that just uses homosexuality as an easy euphemism for moral decay. However, im this case I'm actually going to defend The Forever War. *MAJOR SPOILER FOR THE END OF THE BOOK* At first, it looks exactly like you say, even the main character is explicitly stating that homosexuality is evidence of the inherent moral decay of society. The end of the book, however, reveals something darker and, frankly, more interesting. Humans all end up just like the aliens - a homogenous collective that transcends independent thought. They're all clones of a single supposedly genetically pure specimen, in which they've used technology to give each clone of this one person either male or female sexual presentation. The homosexuality is framed as the first phase of this process; an *inevitable* step in the process of a society advancing beyond the chaos of individuality. In order to remove the uncertainty of random genetic selection, humanity first experiments with genetically matching select male and female gametes to produce offspring. In order to make this policy palatable, the government leans into the widespread and now-normative homosexual phenomena and makes it mandatory. They even go so far as to switch a person's "polarity" if they're discovered to be straight. Only soldiers who come back from interstellar deployment are exempt, grandfathered in under the transitional policy period that they totally missed. In order for the whole thing to work, the random breeding of free heterosexual coupling needs to be stamped out, and it leads the entire civilization down this path towards homogenous cloning as the standard. Perhaps this is still distasteful to some readers, but it is far from the shallow euphemism used in other books. And that's all that I'll defend.
They chose the smartest because they didn't know what they were even fighting. They had to be smart enough to adapt to ever changing conditions. Every deployment involves novelty.
But seriously, the revelation of humanity being an experiment by space gods in Forever Free left me with mixed feelings and felt like it undermined the original story.
No it not it more like a dystopia from all sides We as a society should not allow bricking old men demand how people should live nor let them drag us to hell
It might be interesting to compare Haldeman's Forever War with Keith Laumer's Final War, another, earlier, Cold War allegory. Laumer's treatment is no kinder to the governments waging the war; it's very clear that unthinking arrogance and sheer bloody-minded inertia caused the Final War. What brought it to mind here, though, was that a later polity emerged where Terrans and Melconians lived side-by-side; they became one people.
It’s been a couple of decades since I read this book, you have convinced me to do it again. I look forward to it, as it was always would’ve been favorites. I am curious to reread it in the light of some of the things you say, though. For instance, I remember the enforced sex in Boot Camp in the book, and that struck me as scandalous (to be polite) but also has the exact sort of horny fantasy that was all over the place in 1970s science-fiction. Remember anything in the book that indicated anyone took it as particularly evil, when compared to the 24/7/365 orgies Heinlein’s stuff from the same period is based around (and Heinlein clearly thinks it’s great), the stuff in TFW is pretty tame. I didn’t personally see the breeder planets as zoos. More like retirement communities. Humanity has diverged into two separate species, obviously, so it makes sense they’d live in different places, different homelands. There’s also the interesting line in the end when Man tells the the veterans, ‘we can make you straight if you want. Most people find it helps them fit in’. Although the exact wording is something more judgmental like ‘correct your sexual orientation.’ I once heard someone speculate, that the reason this book was never adapted into a movie, despite having been option, several times, was because it was simply too gay for the 1980s, but that one line in the end makes it not gay enough for the 2010s
It’s so Army… for me it was being sent to Wales on a kayaking course for a week. When I got back I found out I was scheduled for a dentist appointment on the third day of the course.
I was charged fifty pounds as a reprimand because the dentist didn’t check that the ENTIRE regiment was in the same country.
So army.
Joe Haldeman freely admitted he vastly accelerated technological progress in "Private Mandala" so he could have (just barely) Vietnam veterans (and in one case, a Korea Vet) serve as officers in the UNEF's interstellar war.--that was the officer persona Haldeman was familiar with and it provides a pretty solid departure point for the sociological changes throughout the saga. , Right from the start, we have Boomers vs what we now call Generation X (and in William's case, a child of hippies). If you suspend disbelief in having star travel in the 1990s, the reader sees Mandala and Potter dealing with anachronisms from another era, and all too quickly (as within 3 years of their subjective lives) become anachronisms themselves. "The past is a different country..."
It is one of the nightmares that technology has forced upon us. Three hundred years ago, each generation changed really very little from the previous. Teenage rebellion wasn't a thing.
There was continuity in culture and traditions. A boy, as soon as he could waddle on his own feet, would waddle after dad working on their plot of land. While their daughters would swarm around mom, as they were mending clothes, washing clothes, and tending to their vegetable garden.
My grandfather faithfully watches State news. He has done so since he was a boy. Up until the 90s, Norway only had one TV channel.
I consider everything he sees to be villainous propaganda.
While he sees the internet as nothing but a type-writer with jargon within it. Anything I say he immediately claims to be Russian propaganda.
The past is not a different country. It is a different planet. It is not that they do different thing there. It is the fact that they are, at the core, different.
I'm not sure we can say that teenage rebellion wasn't a thing. Certainly not in the way it manifests today, but I think most wars are made possible in no small part by young men wanting to get the hell off the farm.
We've gained things and lost things to be sure. Whether we came out ahead in the exchange remains to be seen.
@@feralhistorianOld men complaining about youth these days is as old as, at the very least, the Ancient Greece. Could be even older, but then, we do not have the written evidence for that.
@@feralhistorianPeople in their teens rebelled, yeah, but there's a difference between the newly-minted adults of yesteryear and the extended adolescence of today's First World.
Weird, because the Bright Youth People for example, existed all the way back in the 1920s, when your grandfather might himself have been a teenager. Ever heard of the Blackboard Jungle? Your grandfather’s generation did exactly what teenagers do today, and I do mean the worst way.
"War is the Point".
That's how the "War on Terror" often feels.
Pretty much any modern war/proxy war US leads is just for that. For example the current war in ukraine is just for the sake of having a war in europe.
War like that in a strategic position causes massive social and economic consequence for the region which has been reflected in the massive economic downturn in EU countries who US has forced pretty much at gun point to join then in backing ukraine or into NATO at cost to their economies. Meanwhile its good business after all everyone is "sending weapons to ukraine" and that means if they are sending theirs then they need to replace those stocks and who are the biggest suppliers to europe? DING DING its US and Sweden. BOOM again war for the sake of war is good for the military industrial complex and the neocons.
Ofc thats me simplifying that, if you want a full very in depth lecture on the topic look at the retired German general Haral Kujat's lecture(there is both translated and dubbed versions on YT) really digging deep into the real background of this conflict and logic from both the military , political and economic background from the US perspective that tells you a lot you won't get from news or military dramatubers.
@@cropathfinderhow much communist propaganda did you ingest😂
@@cropathfinder
I know I'm replying to a relatively old comment but I always have this question on my mind when I see talking points like this;
You realize it's Russia who invaded Ukraine with tanks and guns right? Not America. You seemed to demonize American involvement without mentioning about that fact that's it's Russian missiles landing in Ukrainian cities.
@@117mick7no geopolitical insight, opinion overruled.
@@dagon99 cool. Don't like my opinion? Cry me a river.
The Forever War and Starship Troopers are two sides of each coin, some represents the horrors of war and the isolation towards society, the other represents the greater insight of being part of the army.
One is about a society built by soldiers and steered by them
Because the only only way to be a higher up in ST is to be a former soldier
FW is a society built by politicians and corps where everyone is eventually reduced to a pawn and is to eventually become fuel for the "society"
Hell the federation wasn't even the ones that shot first technically
It was some mormons that against the advise of everyone settled in an area where a bunch of bugs live
The war escalates because the pseudo arachnids can't understand that humans are individualistic and aren't wholely united
Also they chuck a meteor the size of a country to Buenos Aires so that's a giant form of escalation
I bought this book when I was 13 thinking it would be a cool sci-fi action book. Boy, was I wrong - and I didn't really understand it until I re-read the book last year, 15 years after the first read. Great book and great analysis!
In the end life finds a way.
The zoo planets will eventually spread out when the Empire of Clones collapses
That point about becoming the enemy you fight was devastating. I recently had a conversation with a friend about the old propaganda of the Cold War about the USSR, how it could do nothing right, how it was a top down bureaucratic nightmare full of bad ideas that get pushed through because nobody is allowed to say no, how corrupt it was, how it was vulnerable to being misled by nonsensical scientific theories that would have devastating economic and industrial consequences, and how we've basically become all of those things. People think when I make that arguments that its some paranoid right wing fantasy about the return of the red scare but really its less about neo-communism and more about how people's relationship with collectivism seems to have changed as a whole for the worse.
The Sovietization of American society is a topic that most people prefer to ignore, it seems.
@@feralhistorianMore specifically, acquiring all of the negative traits of the Soviet Union, without any of its' redeeming features.
@@feralhistorian The Diary of Pitirim Sorokin is pretty telling in this. In 1917, He was a professor at Saint Petersburg University and a member of the Socialist Revolutionary Party.
He pushed for the revolution in the classroom.
He saw the disaster that the revolution brought.
So he fled to the United States. Where he went and became a professor.
The amounts of Soviet academics that pushed for hell, then fled said hell, just to promote that same hell in their new home, is staggering.
It is certainly all the proof I need to believe in the demonic.
And one of FDR's brilliant ideas as part of the New Deal, was to give these people free money to continue writing their pamphlets, books, and articles.
But hey what do I know.
I consider Teddy Roosevelt to be the first Marxist President of America.
So there is that.
edit: typo
Exactly. My son understands this to some extent, but my daughter does not. I weep for the future.
@@feralhistorian Reaganism had nothing to do with it? Please...
I love the coat. I think it's the reason I subscribed.
Please wear cyberpunk glasses for your next coat show.
A pair of spider Jerusalem shades would be preem.
"Forever War" is my number 1 favourite book.
It has so many levels on which it is mind-expanding - the drastic effects of relativistic travel, the despair of a conscripts life, the futility of pointless wars.
I have read it about five times and found a new perspective to look at the story each time.
An excellent book. I recommend it every time Starship Troopers comes up in conversation
Thank you for your excellent content....my wife and I have been bingeing your commentaries for the last couple days and getting a great deal out of it.
After listening to your book summary, I have a very strong interest in reading this book. The premise sounds fascinating, as I also see the parallels with today's world. Thank you for introducing me to this book.
I read this 40 years ago and, my god, its grimmer than I remembered. Good work.
Your presentations are amazing. I remember this book, but the way you portray it gives it another dimension to think about. Your background looks like Red Dead Redemption 2.
My favorite military science fiction novel. Chock full of inventive ideas, creative battle scenes and a solid love story to boot. Great review!
This video makes me wonder if you've read and what your analysis of Stephen Baxter's Xeelee Sequence books would be.
A large part of the series focuses on a similar idea, humanity getting into an endless war that slowly takes control of human civilization and changes into something inhuman.
I had heard of the Forever War books but didn't know much about them, this video definitely puts them on the list of books I eventually want to read.
I'd be interested on your thoughts on "The High Crusade" by Poul Anderson. It's not your usual dystopian/militaristic theme, but nonetheless I'd like to hear what you think.
I'd be interesting in his thoughts about that also.
It's in my reading list for the next month, so odds are there will be some thoughts.
@@feralhistorian It was actually filmed by a European company, but I have heard the adaptation was absolutely terrible. The book screams for a fun worthy movie, that could become a beloved film for many people.
As deep as the message is in this book, the next two makes it feel like a small puddle next to the challenger deeps. I have all 3 bound together into a tomb entitled "peace and war" and to read it is a complete mind fuck.
This book has SEQUELS? :I ?
i read that book as a kid in 2002 in highschool, i still recommend it to this day. it was a very good book but also sad because you could clearly see at times the mc felt like he was a relic of a long dead era and didnt belong there
Some of my friends ask me why I didn’t like the book Starship Troopers. I always answer, I read the Forever War first.
I read it secondly and I'm glad I did or ST would've felt childish by comparison.
I loved the "three World Wars" line. It's one of several great jokes from the last few weeks, along with the Chuckie III and dick tips comments from the Kings episode.
great book and very thought-provoking commentary. Sincere thanks.
Thank you for your exciting lectures! Also, the beautiful vistas you choose as the backdrop.
Suggest Scalzi's Old Man's War series.
I have very mixed impressions of Old Man's War, and Scalzi in general. But yes, there's some things worth digging into.
Your channel is great man
Great video. I read the book in college and thought the conclusion of the book was that only egalitarian hive mind communism would save us. Because MAN had a presumptious superiority complex to him that seemed justified by the plot and even the tone of the prose. Even if that communal cloned hive mind society seems eerie and dystopian to us, (because it is) that society was in fact morally superior to the individual based humanity of the past. Its also what ussured in peace not only for "human" civilization if you can still call it that, but in the cosmos as well. Not only that but the cloned hive mind society is rather magnanimous and humble and is what esnures Mandella can have a happy ending with his war waifus. Also the war creating instruments that finally over threw capitalism in a cosmic dialectic is a pretty marxist thing as I understand it. I still loved the book and it had a fantastic portrayal of relativistic space warfare i only seen similarly portrayed (but not as well) in Enders Game. Forever war is overall a great book with fantastic reflections even if I dissagree with the conclusion.
That's not the conclusion
It was a really interesting view on how the world would progress over hundreds of years. It reminds me of the future speculative fiction of the turn of the 20th century.
Fantastic books these. Really opened the mind with a crowbar
Wonderful analysis. Would love to see a take on Haldeman’s Forever Peace.
Once again, I love the incisive commentary! The plot sounds like the Great Reset on steroids. 🤔
Wow! I can't believe I missed this one, it is exactly the kind of thing I would have devoured in my 20's.....guess I'll have to enjoy it at 40!
I first read the book 45 years ago when I was 15. l did understand a bit of it then as I have military family and Vietnam had just wrapped up. I eventually got to meet Haldeman; a few times actually. He signed the copy of the book that I bought back in1979. His brother Jack did some work with the agriculture department at the University of Florida so Joe would come into town often and occasionally would sign books at Novel Ideas in Gainesville. I enjoyed the book, and am a bit astonished that some of his 'predictions' came to pass but he's no PKD (lol).
The the/thim pronouns and everyone being gay sure hit me and I read that in like 2014 or something lol.
Another excellent video. Very inciteful and interesting. The criminal lack of subscribers, likes, and views isn't understandable to me (same for youtube"s inability to provide proper notification when you upload). Still patiently waiting for your first 40k video. May I suggest a starting place? The Night Lords Trilogy. I know it isn't one of the usual suggested starting places, but I feel it's still one of the best.
Night Lords added to the reading list.
@@feralhistorian Hope that you enjoy it and find something interesting to comment on. 👍
You should do a discussion of Hammer’s Slammers.
Another absolutely badass scifi war setting
I geuinely think a hive-mind is the most horrifying thing that could possibly be brought into existence. The idea of being denied the most fundamental privacy of your own mind in favor of being essentially mindraped into being a cell in some greater organism that is what really has agency in the world is such a repugnant concept that I can’t see anyone supporting except for the most demented individuals who would want to be the centre on which such a system spins.
My bad dreams were of two kinds, those about spectres and those about insects. The second were, beyond comparison, the worse; to this day I would rather meet a ghost than a tarantula. As Owen Barfield once said to me, ‘The trouble about insects is that they are like French locomotives - they have all the works on the outside.’
The works - that is the trouble. Their angular limbs, their jerky movements, their dry, metallic noises, all suggest either machines that have come to life or life degenerating into mechanism. You may add that in the hive and the ant-hill we see fully realised the two things that some of us most dread for our own species - the dominance of the female and the dominance of the collective.
- From the book "Surprised by Joy" by C.S Lewis.
@@HugebullGhosts themselves aren't the scary bit; it's the implications of ghost existence that are terrifying.
@@boobah5643 I am quoting CS Lewis. It's a fear. In Britain, no insects, other than ticks, would be dangerous. And yet, people are afraid of them.
Then to me, personally, I got ghosts / spirits on my farm.
But as a Puritan, spirits floating about doesn't bother me much.
Other than the fact that my entire region seems to carry a curse of disease, both mental and physical.
Just on my farm alone, two people have gone insane from two different families in the past 50 years.
They cleared this swamp after WW2 here in Norway. And since then, every single one of the five farms here have struggled.
And when I had pigs, I saw shadow people pretty much every day. Or rather, a shadow man would be walking around, seeing him move regularly at the corner of my eye. Everyday feeling the sensation that someone stood within a few yards of me, watching me. You get used to it.
As belief in specters I already have. But even so, as a Puritan, I would have already known that there is all sorts of stuffs going on the world that is beyond nature.
As a people, we have always known that there is stuff beyond nature.
It's only in recent decades that they decided otherwise. The silly gooses our scientists are. Pretty arrogant too, as a Scientist studies nature, and then for them to claim that there is nothing beyond it. I've always found that to be a pretty arrogant assumption.
A hivemind is essentially a single organism. No individual in the book is forced into a hivemind, the hivemind is born onto itself. There is no one to be 'mindraped'
@@CarrotConsumer "There is No War in Ba Sing Se".
"Oceania had always been at war with Eastasia.”
Sounds like Hivemind propaganda to me, Mr Carrot.
I hope to recommend to you Fenrille Series by Christopher Rowley. And if you do not actively dislike fantasy, Glen Cook -- The Black Company books of course, but The Dread Empire books are not bad. The Silver Spike is a good near self-contained starter for The Black Company.
Easily one of my favorite books. Thank you for reviewing.
Be a cool movie
This book and many that came before predicted the future far to well, and it is just sad
Fantastic analysis. You caught a lot that I missed. Thank you
This was a good break down, I had always wondered what the book was about. So thanks for that.
I read this book, oh, 20 years ago. I got it as a suggestion that it was similar to Starship Troopers, though it was, it was also vastly different. I thought it was a bold and out of the box idea with one of the best endings, right up there with Starship Troopers.
Ended up listening to this, great book!
Race of clones, 1 bioweapon is all you need to win
Great review of a book I never plan to read again.
When I was 20, I thought it was too nihilistic and depression. I still feel that way about it being depressing but now it's because the misanthropic story feels too accurate in its predictions of culture and politics.
I have similar problems re-reading 1984.
Don't reread Fahrenheit 451 then
@@semi-useful5178 I find the ending of Fahrenheit 451 to be quite optimistic. Is that strange?
I find Bradbury to me a little more life affirming, though yes there is truth in F 451.@@semi-useful5178
@@Hugebull
The ending is. Alas, there are no competent powers on earth
Forever War and Brave New World are two futures that make me despise the concept of Utopias.
My best friend in College would NOT SHUT UP about this book! LOL I have a copy he gave me, and one of these days I will get around to reading it! But I think his analysis would agree with your own. I think the reason I put off reading it, is because I naively want to maintain some semblance of optimism about the future. Deep down, I know better... (Sigh)
Prophetic book
I read that book in the very early 90’s after the Army, I saw the primitive political correctness then and so understood where the author was going with the “evolution of society “. I was constantly siding with the fewer and fewer Old Timers as the story progressed and welcomed the ending I was hoping for and was relieved to see it so . I still have the book , along with many others that one should not have anymore, saving them for my granddaughters when the are old enough, along with other items... the song Silent Running comes to mind when I think about what they will bear witness too so I will prepare them as best I can. Thank you for covering this great not so well known work of ... fiction ???
Nothing bad in the book was caused by the social changes. It was caused by the war. A war which only ended after the most extreme social changes, that of the clones.
Very interesting your review and comments. Very.
Here's the thing - even if most of humanity has stagnated in the worse way possible, even leading to a singular 'Man', this husk of a 'civilization' will quickly be overshadowed by the breeder planets themselves, especially since they are apparently populated by millennia-old veterans that have likely mastered more skills than anyone else and are now giving birth to a new generation that will make its way in the world.
Sure, the old system has more resources, for a time, but if the original humanity is stagnant, the new one being birthed on those breeder worlds will not be. The people there will seek power, status, and fulfillment. That will inevitably lead them to develop new technologies and new ways of thinking that, in time, are likely to outperform whatever cobwebbed advantages old humanity had.
The fact that the singular Man does not recognize the threat of the breeder worlds leads me to believe that Man is doomed to fall to the true spirit of humanity reasserting itself and crushing all opposition as it grasps towards the stars anew.
**** you sir
Just because I posted that and then realized that somebody that reads this will need more context. That is a direct quote from the book that very directly relates to the commentary in this video.
Additional note, UA-cam has a problem with one of the seven words you can't say on television today.
Hey, have you read Storm of Steel or any of Ernst Junger’s work? Storm of Steel particularly is a really good book on his time as a German volunteer in the Great War.
Storm of Steel of is one of those books I've been meaning to read for my entire adult life and somehow haven't gotten around to. Think I'll grab a copy now.
@@feralhistorian It’s a really good read. Hope you enjoy it. 👍
@@feralhistorianErnst Junger is a masterful writer. Storm of Steel is a fun youthful jaunt of his experiences in the first world war, but he really shines when he starts looking at systems and the relationship we have within said systems. After Storm of Steel, I recommend reading The Worker, The Forest Passage, and lastly Eumeswil. His creation of the anarch archetype would make for a great video lecture on your part.
I also recommend his brother Friedrich Junger's The Failure of Technology: Perfection Without Purpose.
First time I read this book I was ten, and didn't understand a thousandth what I understand now.
The story was good, but we can't overlook the ending of the book and how romantic it was.
13:40ish I do not believe humanity has yet done better, than what was best in the years 1775 ~ 1789.
Read this book as a teenager
Love your analysis
Ta muchly. Beer's in the fridge
Any chance of doing The Mote in God's Eye?
The odds are much greater than zero.
My favourite love story
The Forever War. Otherwise known as Joe Haldeman really did not enjoy Vietnam (but in Space). And just in case Joe was too subtle he also wrote 1968.
4:09 Haldeman saw the future
but wait... they live 1000+ years? only if they die they are replaced with clones? and leaders? do they actually die in end?
I actually did not enjoy this book at all. I've never understood the fascination with it but to each their own I suppose. Your breakdown of is great however and I thoroughly enjoyed the "everyone is gay" part lol. Chefs kiss
War is cold ... so cold.
It's amazing how often fiction mirrors reality.
This what awesome
With that conclusion makes me believe that America is becoming Brazil each year: A Nation without a true a indentity, governed by corrupt beurocrats and Oligarchs... a bleak destiny indeed
Kind of how old veterans like me think about modern America. I would never join today to defend what America is becoming.
Ok boomer.
@@nobodyherepal3292 Scotland just passed a law to take away free speach. Ireland did also. Australia is about to do it. The lefties in charge of Germany right this second are trying to make it illegal to support any party but theirs. The American democrats are encouraging all those things and the department of homeland security is now watching what gamers say in chat rooms. Microsoft says all future "female" characters in games must have clothing covering them from head to toe and their faces must be uglified and androgynous. Chinese boats are hitting bridges and the president is making the taxpayers pay for it. Yes, I spent 20 years in but would never defend this country now. In fact as far as I am concerned all those assigned female gender at birth should be replaced by those who have been assigned male gender at birth in sports and locker rooms.
@@mikect500You say that as if the magatoids aren’t saying the exact same thing
@@DogeickBateman why would anyone who believes in the first, second and fourth amendments and capitalism and meritocracy and wanting America to stop spending money overseas and having a secure border support what America is becoming?
America has a to me troubling propensity of becoming eggsackly what it once furiously fought against.
As Winston Churchill once famously expressed: "America will do the right thing, but not before it has exhausted the alternatives.".
The current state of the US is very much an affirmation of this statement. America is facing a fork in the road and the choices are; a road to continue towards democracy and freedom, or one that leads to a future that is historically eerily reminiscent of that the Roman Empire and its demise. Glorious for the moment and destined to ruinous oblivion in whatever term that escapes that moment.
My instinct tells me to expect this to happen and see democracy snuffed out in favour of military-industrial profits and ideological exertion of power and control. I will resist.
Was the war based on a lie, or a misunderstanding/failure to communicate? I dont remember - was there a deliberate falsehood/deception, or just the reaction to an implacable, uncommunicative enemy?
Near the end, the book specifically states that the war was "begun on false pretenses and only continued because the two races were unable to communicate." It then goes on to explain that it was launched based on "laughably thin" evidence because a war would benefit the military-industrial-complex of the time.
But it's all tacked on at the end, almost like he forgot to mention it earlier.
This is weird. I have recently read this in a short story collection, Dealing in Futures, by Joe Haldeman. A novella titled You Can Never Go Back.
You can Never Go Back is basically an interlude (middle section) of the novel.
Enjoyed your analysis of the book and your thoughts regarding modern America which is slowly walking the path to right wing fascism and eventual Oligarchy.
Its a great book. It'd be a great movie
I think there's a great 8-10 episode series that could be made from Forever War. HBO would probably do it well. Netflix maybe. Amazon would bugger it all up.
Nice
You DAMN SKIPPY!!!!
I read the serialization in Analog when it first came out. I guffawed at the refs to Viet Nam(US involvement had just ended); but the total ignorance of 'Despise not thine Enemy' and 'Know thine Enemy' made the finale inevitable. Sadly, the Genetic diversity that was kept in the book is being eroded in reality.
What a view
Joe Halderman is a prophet…
Gets a like for the UN trafficking comment!!! It isn't a big leap by any means.
might be the cynic in me but that last bit about wanting the US to be the good guys smacks of someone who bought into the "American Myth" that best showcased by our "manifest destiny" in with which we legitimized our betrayal, manipulation and exploitation of the Native American tribes followed by the rest of our external fiddling with banana republics and messing with the democratic processes of other countries. We have never been the good guys at best we have been the least bad guys, an other perfect example of that would be how impressed and taken aback the nazis where with our racism which they later took a step further but the best bit is after we sent bodies to help end that war once we where directly bothered by it, we kept on being the racist nation we have always been. GIs that were people of color where denied the heros welcome their white fellows where drowned in, instead they got told to sit in the back of buses or denied loans and jobs they earned by bleeding for the very culture that now remembered they werent white.
I heard about The Forever War as a young teen, but didn't get my hands on a copy until I was in my 20's, and already a disabled veteran in my own right. I found the book to be... Extremely disappointing. It's exactly what a cynical mind would expect to see produced by a Vietnam conscript, in all the worst ways.
First, the author attempts to portray military conscription as trending towards taking the most intelligent and capable from society to power an ever more complex war machine. As a commentary, this is flatly wrong, and anyone who paid a lick of attention to military technology would know this. All modern militaries follow one of two form factors for infantry technology: either 1) build the weapon or armor system in whatever way works, and focus on teaching soldiers to use that single system and no other, or 2) Find something common to the experience of the vast majority of potential soldiers, and build the system with a form factor that will use the pre-existing cultural skill to make training easier and faster. This doesn't require highly intelligent recruits - on the contrary, it assumes that most front line infantry consists of people who could barely pass compulsory education.
Second, the author made a habit of skipping plot in order to get to social commentary. Descriptions of government systems and social programs go on for paragraphs and pages, setting up scenes through exposition and worldbuilding. And then, the scene itself passes so fast that a reader can almost miss it. The dialogue is scant, and mostly exists to demonstrate the punchline of some political point.
Finally, the blatant generational arrogance. The Mandala character is typical of what I see in Vietnam veterans: everyone before the Baby Boomers are stupid, heartless barbarians, and everyone in subsequent generations are morally and socially bankrupt, and their intellect is only held up because of advancements in educational technology.
The author, for all of his real world experience, demonstrates no understanding of historical trends anywhere in the book. Historically, powerful militaries and their governments have grown from either a virtuous or tenacious seed, flourished into imperial glory, and then decayed into a form of advanced backwater society before disappearing completely as a people and culture. Our current western civilization shows no sign of being any different from these trends, but Haldeman missed... All of that. So much commentary, with so many thoughts, but all of it is flash in the pan. A real disappointment.
Good points all. I didn't get the impression that Haldeman was saying that conscription at the time takes the best and brightest, since obviously it was slanted the other way with various college and vocational exemptions. Rather that it was a "what if they drafted rich people too" kind of commentary. Simplistic but not entirely baseless. Like UNEF is a darker version of Star Trek's Federation, where everyone going into space has to be brilliant because they could encounter anything.
But yeah, it's more Haldeman's commentary than a story. Every few years I hear someone ask why no one ever made a movie from "Forever War" . . . Because it would be a janky piece of cinema that would be marketed as sci-fi action only to confuse and annoy the people that showed up based on that.
---
You make an interesting point regarding form factor for infantry weapons. I was working for SIG back when the XM5 trial was still going on (I was on the optics side, had nothing to do with the design of that rifle) and one of the team there was really impressed by the Textron design, from an engineering perspective.
I argued that if the Army picked anything it would be the SIG design, because it's the closest to what they already have. Chonky-M4 wins over weird polymer-cased ammo with moving chambers and all that other weird shit it was doing. I think the choice of the SIG design was mostly due to the factors you mention, minimal retraining of current personnel and some cultural familiarity with AR-style controls.
But the further you get from infantry, the more specialized everything seems to get. Growing up driving tractors may have helped American and Russian tank drivers in WWII, but not so much today.
@@feralhistorian - the XM-4 project was wild, from what I've read. The optics were some of the best things to come out of the whole program, at least in terms of general adoption. I wish I could take credit for the form factor discussion, but really it was mentioned in an article I read a while ago about the XM-4 project. It resonated with me, since the M-67 frag grenade is specifically built to resemble a baseball because most Americans have thrown one of those.
So I did more reading, and yeah, Americans adopt form factors that are common to the American experience in some way because it makes learning the system easier. Other countries adopt whatever they want, but then design all of their training around teaching their soldiers those specific systems, and not worry about generalizations until advanced training at some future point. Different schools of thought, but both are developed for the least common denominators of society.
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I'd like to say that I generally agree with your review of the book. Your points were well chosen, and it's clear from the video that you have your own, strong thoughts and opinions on the matter, which you kept to a minimum. That's uncommon in reviews of books like this, so bravo!
The book itself is... Decent. Haldeman is a good writer. He's no Asimov, but he's at least a Dickson, lol. Personally, I think The Forever War is mostly just him processing his experiences and emotions, which is honestly fine. I don't think I'd ever feel comfortable trying to publish such a book, but to each their own. I was just personally disappointed with it. I'd heard good things from trusted people about the speculative fiction in it, and had been interested to see how the author was going to manage such a monumental span of time and advancement. A thousand years, with a continual narrative! But, it's really just 20-ish years, broken up into three or four major sections, all following a single culture stuck in Cold War-style advancement. It's okay. Could be better. As an outlet for the author's military trauma, I sincerely hope it helped.
This book had me intrigued until I heard the plot point that everyone is gay in the future. It’s lazy, bigoted Boomer shorthand for “moral decay” and its disappointingly endemic in spec-fic of this era.
@@thehistorian1232 - As a general rule, I agree with you. There is A LOT of spec fic from the later 20th century that just uses homosexuality as an easy euphemism for moral decay. However, im this case I'm actually going to defend The Forever War.
*MAJOR SPOILER FOR THE END OF THE BOOK*
At first, it looks exactly like you say, even the main character is explicitly stating that homosexuality is evidence of the inherent moral decay of society. The end of the book, however, reveals something darker and, frankly, more interesting.
Humans all end up just like the aliens - a homogenous collective that transcends independent thought. They're all clones of a single supposedly genetically pure specimen, in which they've used technology to give each clone of this one person either male or female sexual presentation. The homosexuality is framed as the first phase of this process; an *inevitable* step in the process of a society advancing beyond the chaos of individuality.
In order to remove the uncertainty of random genetic selection, humanity first experiments with genetically matching select male and female gametes to produce offspring. In order to make this policy palatable, the government leans into the widespread and now-normative homosexual phenomena and makes it mandatory. They even go so far as to switch a person's "polarity" if they're discovered to be straight. Only soldiers who come back from interstellar deployment are exempt, grandfathered in under the transitional policy period that they totally missed.
In order for the whole thing to work, the random breeding of free heterosexual coupling needs to be stamped out, and it leads the entire civilization down this path towards homogenous cloning as the standard.
Perhaps this is still distasteful to some readers, but it is far from the shallow euphemism used in other books. And that's all that I'll defend.
They chose the smartest because they didn't know what they were even fighting. They had to be smart enough to adapt to ever changing conditions. Every deployment involves novelty.
Yep. The agricultural revolution was a mistake.
For the last 10,000 years, the 'Civilized' don't even realize they're domesticated animals. Amusing.
your angry because you aren't going to die thanks to a minor injury
@@generaldelasmontanas2699 *you're
The second book was a disappointment...
That's what I usually hear.
Forever War = Do wars. Be gay.
But seriously, the revelation of humanity being an experiment by space gods in Forever Free left me with mixed feelings and felt like it undermined the original story.
Wow, the society in this book sounds like a leftist wet dream.
It ends sterile,soulless, and uniform.
Closer to the right-wing ideals to me.
@@Youcancallmeishmaell Everyone is homosexual and of one mind…definitely a woke paradise.
@@bombfog1
Colorless and dispassionate.
The Liberal paradise is the Federation from Star Trek.
No it not it more like a dystopia from all sides
We as a society should not allow bricking old men demand how people should live nor let them drag us to hell
@@bombfog1 Can you give a real definition of woke?
come on bro please don't be mad about pronouns.
Wars are good for business and weapons and supplies. That means continued stock market shares paying dividends. 😅
Actually no it isn't
Another great video. Well done!
It might be interesting to compare Haldeman's Forever War with Keith Laumer's Final War, another, earlier, Cold War allegory. Laumer's treatment is no kinder to the governments waging the war; it's very clear that unthinking arrogance and sheer bloody-minded inertia caused the Final War.
What brought it to mind here, though, was that a later polity emerged where Terrans and Melconians lived side-by-side; they became one people.
dumb and wrong.
Yes, please.
It’s been a couple of decades since I read this book, you have convinced me to do it again. I look forward to it, as it was always would’ve been favorites. I am curious to reread it in the light of some of the things you say, though. For instance, I remember the enforced sex in Boot Camp in the book, and that struck me as scandalous (to be polite) but also has the exact sort of horny fantasy that was all over the place in 1970s science-fiction. Remember anything in the book that indicated anyone took it as particularly evil, when compared to the 24/7/365 orgies Heinlein’s stuff from the same period is based around (and Heinlein clearly thinks it’s great), the stuff in TFW is pretty tame.
I didn’t personally see the breeder planets as zoos. More like retirement communities. Humanity has diverged into two separate species, obviously, so it makes sense they’d live in different places, different homelands. There’s also the interesting line in the end when Man tells the the veterans, ‘we can make you straight if you want. Most people find it helps them fit in’. Although the exact wording is something more judgmental like ‘correct your sexual orientation.’
I once heard someone speculate, that the reason this book was never adapted into a movie, despite having been option, several times, was because it was simply too gay for the 1980s, but that one line in the end makes it not gay enough for the 2010s