marcicat | book review: The Forever War

One of my coworkers gave me this book (The Forever War, by Joe Haldeman) and said I might like it. Then he kept asking if I’d read it, which apparently is the best way to get me to do something. Finally I read it last night just so I could start saying yes.

1. If you’ve seen the movie American Outlaws, you’ve pretty much got the idea of this book. (If American Outlaws had been really, really depressing, and included time dilation.)

2. It’s such a small thing, but the cover of the book shows a person in presumed-to-be military garb, striding through what is clearly a jungle towards a bright circle of light. I just — I kept expecting there to be a jungle at some point. Any point. (Note: There’s not.)

3. It was okay. I guess I don’t totally buy it as an eye-opening war novel; it wasn’t so much a surprise ending as a ‘yeah, that’s pretty much what I expected’ in terms of the war plot. I did think it offered an interesting viewpoint on the adaptability of humanity.

4. The main character goes through the book with very much a sense of ‘well, this is the only way forward,’ but every time he comes back into contact with ‘objective time’ it always turns out that no, actually *some* people made a different choice. Maybe not a better choice, but one he’d never thought of.

5. Now I can take my Christmas romance novel on the weekend trip instead of this one!

Mirrored from The Marci Rating System.