Review of The Forever War

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The Forever War (The Forever War, #1)The Forever War by Joe Haldeman
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

The Forever War may be a Sci-Fi classic but it shouldn’t be.

Throughout the book we follow the main character as he goes through a series of unconnected scenes, like a bad documentary. Seeing a bit of everything the author imagines about the future. All this is punctuated with brief moments of exposition either spoken or by internal monologue. Instead of showing us the story that interconnects these snippets of the future we are told it, and it isn’t until over halfway through the book that we get our first moments of character development that isn’t told to us as a recap of what came between the last two scenes.

The “love story” happens entirely off page, and there is almost no actual development of their relationship, again essentialy just being shown unconnected bits of the relationship without any of the important movement.

In addition, this book is a perfect example of poorly written “hard” Sci fi. The author spends so much time explaining the technology, and so little time on character development and plot that to those of us reading it from the authors future are left only with a picture of what someone thought our present and future might be like, and with nothing else holding the novel together we can only shake our heads at how wrong they were, and how silly the portrayal of the future looks.

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