The Forever War by Joe Haldeman (1974) For military science fiction, there can be no better example than Joe Haldeman’s The Forever War. Not only does it show the life of a military grunt as he proceeds through the ranks, but it gives us a young man easy to relate to as he fights an alien enemy. The novel is split into clever sections: Private, Sergeant, Lieutenant, and Major and takes us along on his life trip as he grows to be a man and […]
Point Counterpoint, or: How I learned to Stop Worrying and Enjoy the Show
Like the two disconnected eyes of some monstrous oracle, these books look out of their respective time periods, casting forward to try and envision a future that could arise from contemporaneous events. One sings of nationalistic pride in service to the state, while the other firmly declares that war is a pointless and exploitative endeavor whose only benefit is the fostering of an unwieldy bureaucracy feeding on the health of its people. These books are diametrically opposed to one another, but each also serves as […]
Time-travel for dummies. That’s probably mean but I don’t care.
A couple of years ago, I pounded the Goodreads pavement pretty hard searching for pretty much any time-travel book I could find to add to my ever-growing to-read list (a list which has, to my horror, since surpassed 1,500 books–for every book I periodically cull, ten more pop up in its place). The Accidental Time Machine was one of the books I found. I’d heard of Joe Haldeman because his Forever War series is a classic of the miliatary sci-fi genre, although I have yet to […]