It is said that few things “date” faster than science fiction. The closer to the present the story is set, the sillier something can look later, especially after the putative date in the story. Many stories written in the Fifties and Sixties and set in the Nineties look quaint now, if not outright bonkers.
But predicting the future is not what science fiction is about. To paraphrase Samuel R. Delany, all science fiction is about the present, using the future as a special lens through which to examine it.
Given that, certain works can become completely different books when read later.
I first read Joe Haldeman’s The Forever War a few years after its publication. At that time, I experienced it as a solid example of military SF in dialogue with Robert A. Heinlein’s Starship Troopers and the pleasure of the story (if pleasure is the right word) was in the details of an interstellar conflict fought in a non-FTL universe, with the inevitable consequences of time-dilation as an added factor. Reading it again years later I thought it was less a dialogue with Heinlein and more an examination of the momentum of false assumptions and how wars inevitably create their own “time dilations” for those who fight, eventually prying them loose from their own cultures and returning them as inadvertent misfits.
This time, I see it as a novel about transitions—their inevitability and the impossibility of anticipating them and the stress on those forced to confront dislocations in time faced with dramatic change. The soldier especially undergoes culture shock because the soldier has been set to fight for a set of assumptions which may well be overturned when the fighting is over.
But more than that, in keeping with the above-mentioned focus of science fiction being about the present, Haldeman was commenting on transitions that occur with or without war and the difficulty of accommodating them over a long stretch of time. Private William Mandella begins in a 1990s milieu which seems to be a progression from where we thought we were going back in the Sixties—and looking back, we clearly did not experience those transitions that way—and with that as his baseline for “normal” is put in a pocket and carried through variations of “what we are fighting for” that shocked, unsettled, and dismayed him.
The details of the future armed forces can seem…dissonant…with what we have seen since.
While the open sexuality on display plays different these days, there is in Haldeman’s depiction an unremarked but at the time novel egalitarianism in that while the expectation that everyone would be pairing up as a matter of course, it is depicted as a practice both parties fully embrace. And as time dilation works its revelations on these quickly-archaic soldiers, the introduction of homosexuality as at first wholly acceptable and then eventually completely normal and ultimately the sexual default challenges any notion of dominance in relationships. The idea of egalitarianism is simply a given throughout.
Yet there is also a disturbing line that such equality will always be tied to a certain degree of conformity, the standards of which may change and mutate in detail. Until finally, there is Man, a single cloned entity, dealing with those left out in a humane and yet in some ways condescending manner by setting aside enclaves in which a particular kink can be practiced apart from the apparent utopianism of the primary culture.
Haldeman’s treatment of the war itself, primarily its conclusion, seems very much an artifact of Vietnam, in which the antagonists were caught in an ongoing struggle borne of mutual incomprehension. That all wars happen for absurd reasons, said absurdity often unseen until after the conflict is over, is a given. The individual soldier, however, is always left with a simple task—survive. Survival can take on the lineaments of a moral crusade and many a self-proclaimed pacifist has doubtless found becoming a good and effective combatant easier than expected.
Like any good novel, The Forever War leaves us with questions, the chief one in any war being Just what is it we’re fighting for? It is at the end almost never what we imagined it to be at the beginning.
The continued ability of work like this to elicit those questions may be one of the primary traits of a classic.
