Before Plan 9

Posted on February 9, 2017 by smellincoffee

Before Plan 9: Plans 1-8 From Outer Space
© 2012 various authors
354 pages

TV Producer:”About the title…it’s highly inflammatory. What if we changed it to ‘Plan 9 from Outer Space’?”
Ed Wood: …that’s ridiculous. 
(From Ed Wood, starring Johnny Depp)

Greetings, my friends. We are all interested in the future, for that is where you and I shall spend the rest! of our lives. But this is not a book about the future, it is one about the past. Specifically, it’s a prequel to the 1950s cult classic, Plan 9 from Outer Space.  For those who have never experience the particular pleasure of it,  the film features aliens making contact with Earth,  who have hopes of convincing us not to blow up the universe by creating three “zombies”, two of whom are actually vampires.   I watched it a few weeks ago as part of a series of 1950s SF (along with Them! The Beast from 20,000 Fanthoms, Satellite in the Sky, and World Without End) and have since become morbidly fascinated with the work of Ed Wood. How could I resist this little volume, each story-chapter documenting the nine previous plans that the mysterious aliens visited upon the Earth?    Like the movie, this book of tales is more comedic than thrilling, and by plan 8 the novelty had worn off on me entirely.  The premise is that roughly since the Age of the Dinosaurs, the same group of aliens has been cloning itself and maintaining a watch over Earth, attempting to persuade Earthings (first intelligent dinosaurs, then humans) not to blow up the galaxy.  The stories are most clever early on, as the authors insert the aliens into the tale of Odysessus (turns out all those gods and monsters were alien creatures, who knew?), ancient Egypt (aliens did build the pyramids!), and the story of the Pied Piper.    There are numerous references to other SF stories and legends — Roswell, obviously —  and even one particularly funny hat-tip to Ed Wood himself. In a chapter set in Victorian America, a scientist named Glen must pretend to be a woman to find out where mind-control corsets are taking all the wives of his village; naturally, he asks people to call him Glenda.  The Nazi antics seem like something out of an old Captain America plot (Heil Hydra!), and then we get a bunch of monster movies towards the end.   Some references attempt to explain the silliness of the film, like the alien saucers being suspended by wires:  an alien complains that Earth’s atmosphere is so turbulent that their ships are damaged and having to be towed by other ships in higher orbits.

If you find Plan 9 from Outer Space to be in the “so bad it’s good” kind of movie,  you may enjoy these little stories to a degree.  My enthusiasm waned after the Victorian story, which I think is my favorite.

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The Future of the Mind

Posted on February 5, 2017 by smellincoffee

The Future of the Mind: the Scientific Quest to Understand, Enhance, and Empower the Mind
© 2014 Michio Kaku
400 pages

In The Future of the Mind, physicist Michio Kaku talks with psychologists and neurologists like V.S. Ramachandran (Phantoms in the Brain, The Tell-Tale Brain) and Steven Pinker (The Blank Slate, The Language Instinct) to find out: what do we know about the brain, and how will we be using that in the future?    Although he’s confessedly writing outside of his arena, Kaku  does his best to pass along current progress in neurology, which is beginning to understand how memories are stored, how the brain is networked, and is even attempting to manipulate the brain according to this fledgling knowledge.  Especially provoking is the idea that the two lobes of our brain are both semi-conscious, constantly jostling for attention,  The essential thing to realize about the brain, says Kaku, is that it runs on electromagnetism like thing else: we can thus contrive machines to gauge its activity and even interact with it. This is starting to be done on a small scale as scientists manipulate mice by stimulating certain parts of their brain with light or somesuch, triggering them to blink at will.  These machines can in a limited sense even “read” minds, or at least determine whether a person is thinking about another person, or an object, or music — different areas of the brain light up depending.  But more technological-neurological interaction may one day allow stroke victims to once again interact with their environment, and to counter diseases like Alzheimers.  Kaku also includes wilder speculation like recording dreams and downloading memories, and as in his Physics of the Future includes a great many pop culture references — using films like The Matrix and Surrogates.    Of course, a book on technology and intelligence can’t very well miss robotics and artificial intelligence, so there’s a good dose all around. I found this book much more interesting than Physics of the Future, in part because Kaku focused so much on toys, and here there’s a great deal of emphasis on health.  It’s very speculative in parts, but I found the science and the work in progress today to be utterly fascinating, especially appreciating the comments on artificial intelligence and robots.

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The City on the Edge of Forever: the Original Teleplay

Posted on February 5, 2017 by smellincoffee

The City on the Edge of Forever: The Original Teleplay
© 1996 Harlan Ellision, with numerous afterwords
276 pages

In the classic Star Trek episode, “The City on the Edge of Forever”, Captain Kirk must chase a mentally disturbed man into Earth’s past to save its future. Based on a teleplay penned by Harlan Ellison, it featured the kind of moral dilemma not seen again until Star Trek Deep Space Nine. Kirk falls in love with a woman of Earth’s past, but if he saves her from a deathly fate, the Federation itself will — through the usual ‘want of a nail’ reckoning — cease to be. The original teleplay was heavily modified before it hit the screen, however, with many hands tinkering with it. Unfortunately for Star Trek, this tinkering wasn’t routine, instead creating and sustaining a long-lived feud between Roddenberry and Ellison. It wasn’t that Roddenberry merely altered the teleplay beyond recognition, Ellison hotly maintains here; it’s that for years Roddenberry and his admirers mis-represented what was done, defamed Ellison’s character and told outright lies about his involvement in the creative process. In this volume, Ellison first presents his side of the story, follows with the original teleplay and several revisions, and concludes with perspectives from other Trek luminaries like Nimoy and D.C. Fontana. For a fan of the original show, this is quite the read. Ellison’s opening apologia bristles with contempt for Star Trek as a franchise, which had ceased to be about boldly imaginative stories and became a bland action-adventure series in space. Provided, however, that the Trek-loving reader is not a quivering bowl of jelly, Ellison’s jabs can be absorbed and the peek into early Star Trek appreciated in full.

Ellison’s original teleplay for the “City on the Edge of Forever” follows the opening essay/rant, and tells a dramatically different story from that portrayed on the screen. Oh, the basics are there — time travel, New York, Edith Keeler — but the motives and executions are different. Speaking of execution, that’s how in the original story Kirk and company came to the planet to begin with. They were looking for a desolate cinder on which they could summarily execute a crewman for murder, peddling drugs, interfering with the affairs of other cultures, and the unauthorized use of a transporter without additional personal present, as required by the Federation OSHA. (Okay, I’m kidding about that last one.) The notion of an Enterprise crewmember selling drugs to innocent third-world space people was too much for Roddenberry to tolerate, never mind that throughout the show other Federation personnel would prove morally flawed. Think of Captain Tracey from the Omega Glory, or the crazy psychologist whose Tracey’s actor also portrayed. In Ellison’s original and in the revisions, the drug-peddling fellow seeks escape from justice by entering the temporal vortex on the planet. Kirk and Spock realize that their dope-peddler has changed history somehow, and thus enter the portal to pursue the plot along familiar lines — until the end.

It is the end that makes City on the Edge of Forever. In the television version, Kirk is forced to make a heroic sacrifice, to allow the woman he loves to meet her deathly fate so that the Federation might be saved. That doesn’t happen in Ellison’s original. Instead, when push come to shove and Kirk sees death hurtling toward Edith, he fails at the last. Like Frodo, his moral stamina is exhausted at the precipice of Mount Doom, and he can’t do it. Only this time, Spockwise Gamgee does the deed for him instead of Smeagol. This is a rare look at Kirk, a man whose pain, love, and yearning can overwhelm Steely Federation Resolve. Roddenberry wanted to make his Starfleet and the Federation perfect — just see the TNG series bible — but not only is that more fantastical than Lord of the Rings, it makes for really boring stories. What is left to work with, god-aliens and the warp core constantly threatening to overload? Fortunately, Deep Space Nine brought back moral quandries with a vengeance — and none surpasses Sisko’s “In the Pale Moonlight”!

There are other minor changes; in his afterword, David Gerrold comments on how Ellison’s set directions were effectively disregarded or mis-read. He imagined an eerie city filled with runes, guarded by ancient creatures who seemed to be set in stone. What was built was…ruins, and a lopsided donut. (One person in the afterword alleges that the set director read the script while enjoying a night out at the bar, interpreted runes and ruins, and bob justman’s your uncle. Seems a bit too tidy for me.) Altogether Ellison writes that he created five different revisions, grooming the story in an attempt to make Roddenberry happy. For instance, he dropped the enterprising drug peddler angle altogether, and has McCoy bitten by an alien creature and subsequently becoming addled. Not satisfied with Ellison, however, other writers were put to work axing this or that, and the doctor becomes a nincompoop who sticks himself with a hypo on accident.

Having read through all this, I can agree that in many ways Ellison’s story was superior, even with some rough spots. In the first teleplay, for instances, he introduces too much too soon: the Guardians of Forever give Kirk the entire plot, telling him that the fugitive is going to try to save someone who is fated for death by the laws of the universe or somesuch, and he needs to rescue them. Later revisions improve this to make it more mystical and dramatic when Kirk has a sudden moment of realization. The drug-dealing plot I thought was rather interesting: I’m most partial to the original series when it reveals its rough roots, when we encounter details that demonstrate how Roddenberry was still establishing what kind of Earth this was he was writing about. The original Starfleet, for instance, had many more details and mores from 1950s military culture, including the death penalty for violating a specific general directive. (See “The Cage”/”The Menagerie”) The narcotic Ellison used wasn’t just some powder or fluid, it used sound to intoxicate the human brain. That’s a concept I’d like to see explored!

In the end, the afterwards by Nimoy, Takei, Koenig, D.C Fontana, and David Gerrold (the latter two being Trek writers) add other brief perspectives and make this a book Trek fans should find considerable interest in. They will be insulted repeatedly in the beginning, but the story that follows is worth experiencing, especially given that it allows us a rare look into the creative process. Ellison’s temper, which DC Fontana wryly notes is as dangerous as an H-bomb, and has a half-life just as long — makes him a prickly fellow to get to know at first, but I’ve read enough of Leonard Nimoy’s frustrations trying to work with Roddenberry to realize the “Great Bird of the Galaxy” wasn’t the ideal visionary he was sometimes made out to be. I don’t know of any Trekkies who hold him in that luminous regard, and that includes the TrekBBS community I’m an active member of. Besides, Isaac Asimov was great friends with Ellison, so he had to have been a good soul under the indignant defensiveness he displays here.

5 stars for interest, 4 for execution. Ellison’s opening essay repeats itself a bit.

Related:
I Am Spock, Leonard Nimoy

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We Forgot Our New Years Pie

Posted on February 4, 2017 by smellincoffee

Every year I typically post an enormous year-in-review with a pie graph. This year I decided to try out a mere top ten list instead of the usual monograph, but I still need my graph fix. So here’s a graphic.

2016 Reading by Category:

History, as usual, gets the lion’s share — still, not as much as last year’s 37%.   My reading was intentionally more diverse this year, and accordingly science made a strong showing — with more reads last year than in the previous two yeas combined.   When I began the year I wanted to model it after 2013, which was terrific in both terms of quality of books and in the variety of topics I considered.  Just look at the spread!
2013
Back to 2016: my Digital World theme became mostly about cyber security, but I made a lot of progress in reading books about middle-east histoy and am building on that this year to look at the history of east Asia.   I also kept three of my five resolutions, the two failures being (1) buying fewer books and (2) reviewing books that I loved but never shared here. 
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Trade, ancient and modern: from China to the Sharing Economy

Posted on February 4, 2017 by smellincoffee

Two micro-reviews for you…one on The Silk Road: Two Thousand Years in the Heart of Asia, the other on Mesh: Why the Future of Business is Sharing.

The Silk Road consists of several chapters in central-Asian history, with generous photographs of the landscape or art connected to the region. If readers are interested primarily in the Silk Road’s heyday, the volume may be mildly disappointing, as the chapters on exploration, archaeology, and looting in the ‘modern’ age (19th century and continuing) constitute half the book. There is much of interest, however, and all of that archaeological looting is still firmly connected to central Asia’s golden age. I would read it as a supplement to a more substantive history of the Silk Road trade than a history of it, however.


Mesh: Why the Future of Business is Sharing introduces the notion of ‘mesh’ businesses, which sustain themselves on a great deal of interaction between customers and the business itself, typically involving ‘sharing’ resources.  Sometimes the business may merely be the platfom through which customers interact with one another — AirBnB, for instance. The book is written almost as a pitch, urging people in the wake of the Great Recession to consider what kind of mesh businesses they could think of. The author argues that the market is ripe:  because of the recession, trust in traditional brands is or was at an all-time low, and people are more willing to experiment.   Many successful companies were founded amid recessions, says the author, because their founders saw a way to create something useful in the rubble.  Because mesh businesses are all about using goods more efficienctly, they can grow even in an economic crunch: indeed, that’s their selling point. Why waste money buying a car when one can be borrowed at-will through Zipcar?  This more efficient use of resources is also more sustainable from an environmental point of view: to use the same example, a Zipcar’s pollutants are not only spread out among many people’s use, but they and services like Uber mean that cars no longer need to waste their potential sitting around in a parking lot or on the street all day,  consuming space or clogging the arteries of trade.    I found Mesh interesting, but slightly dated, not mentioning services like uber which were technically around back then,but hadn’t exploded in popularity the wav they have now.  

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Podcast of the Week: Lewis, Tolkien, and the Great War

Posted on February 1, 2017 by smellincoffee

This week I’m highlighting #272 of the Art of Manliness podcast, an interview with the author of A Hobbit, a Wardrobe, and a Great War.  This book examines C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien’s role in the Great War and delves into ways that civilization catastrophe shaped the minds and the writing of these two much-loved authors.

The Art of Manliness podcast is another heavy favorite of mine, largely because its author has such an excellent, well-seasoned conception of manhood.  Brett McKay doesn’t write articles on being a pickup artist or an alpha-male athlete.  His perception of masculinity is deeply inspired by the Greco-Roman concept of manly virtue; that is, character and masculinity were deeply mixed. Much of his writing concerns not only being good at being male —  learning skills, taking on challenges — but being a good man, a good husband, a well-informed citizen who can learn, communicate, and work well with others.   He also interviews authors frequently;  professionals, scientists, physicians, soldiers, etc,    In addition to sharing scientific studies, literary criticism, etc. McKay also has sections on grooming and style.

A few samples:
Honor, Courage, Thumos, and Plato’s Idea of Manliness
How to Deal with Aggressive People
The Classical Education You Never Had
Harnessing Behavioral Psychology for a Rich Life
The Manliness of Jack London
Level Up Your Life with Nerd Fitness

McKay has been the source of a few reads here, including The Thin Man last year.

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A Whirligig Tour of the Beautiful Basics of Science

Posted on January 31, 2017 by smellincoffee

The Canon: A whirligig Tour of the Beautiful Basics of Science
© 2007 Natalie Angier
293 pages

Science is amazing! Why is so much of the writing about it so lame?   Natalie Angier’s The Canon first reviews the principles of scientific thinking before talking – nay, gushing — about the basics of physics, chemistry, cosmology, biology,  astronomy, and geology.   But this isn’t just a science primer like Almost Everyone’s Guide to Science, or Theories for Everything. It is written with a conscious desire to seem fun, so the author is borderline bubbly and generous with cultural references and wordplay.  It’s sometimes distracting, but I enjoyed it on the whole.  The personable approach to science also manifests itself in the way Angier works in little stories about her life that relate (like being thunderstruck by an earthquake in her normally placid residence in  D.C.), or interviews with scientists in the field, whose own love and continuing wonder for their subject is part of the delivery.   This is definitely a layman’s approach to science — there’s no graphs, equations, or tables to be found, no terrifying mathematics — but what made a winner for me, from the get-go, were the opening chapters on thinking scientifically. Angier sells the scientific method to readers by connecting it to what they already do: for instance,  the act of troubleshooting a technical problem is similar, as we attempt to narrow down problems by focusing on one variable at a time. A reader who reads Brian Greene with ease may find Angier’s lively — manic, even —  romp through the lab to be silly, but I found her enthusiasm welcome and the wordplay diverting.  A sample from her chapter on geology:

The planet we inhabit, the bedrock base on which we build our lives, is in a profound sense alive as well, animate form from end to end and core to skin. Earth, as I said earlier, is often called the Goldilocks planet, where conditions are just right for life and it is neither too hot nor too cold, where atoms are free to form molecules and water droplets to pool into seas. There is something about Goldilocks, beyond her exacting tastes, that makes her a noteworthy character, a fitting focus for our attentions. The girl cannot sit still. She’s restless and impulsive and surprisingly rude. She wanders off into woods without saying where she’s headed or when she’ll be home. She barges through doors uninvited, helps herself to everybody else’s food, and breaks the furniture. But don’t blame her. She can’t help herself. Goldilocks is so raw and brilliant that she has to let off steam. Like Goldilocks the protagonist, Goldilocks the planet is a born dynamo, and without her constant twitching, humming, and seat bouncing, her intrinsic animation, Earth would not have any oceans, or skies, or buffers against the sun’s full electromagnetic fury; and we animate beings, we DNA bearers, would never have picked  ourselves up off the floor.   The transaction was not one-sided, though. The restless, heave-hoing motions of the planet helped give rise to life, and restless life, in turn, reshaped Earth.” 

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Looking ahead & some also-reads

Posted on January 31, 2017 by smellincoffee
I intentionally launched this year off with some fun reading, so we’re off to a good start and there’s more on the way.  Yesterday Amazon held a flash sale for science books, and I picked up a few relatively recent releases for the princely sum of $7.   
Read but not reviewed this month have been:

Ask a Science Teacher, a collection of  250 science columns written in response to reader-submitted questions, Many of the initial questions were solicited from schoolrooms, and the book as a whole is targeted to a younger audience — anywhere from late elementary to early high school, I would think. I found it interesting enough, but laced with corny jokes.

India in the Global Community, P. Paramundi Karan. A brief introduction to India, which I read to grease the rails for a larger and more substantial history. This little book covered geography, politics, industry, religion, culture, diplomacy, etc. all in different chapters. The tone and bounty of photos suggest it was written for younger audiences, like middle school. For whatever reason it was cataloged with my library’s adult nonfiction, though, and I stumbled upon it while shelving books.  While it covers a great deal, it’s all very superficial. The chapter on political history, for instance, mentions the Aryans, then disorder; Asoka, then disorder; the Mughals, then disorder; the Brits, and then Gandhi & Nehru, followed by several wars with Pakistan.

Coming up this week: a review for another science  book read this week, a possible review for a digital enterprise book, Asian history, and more in my developing “good news for the future” theme.  So far I’m including In the City of Bikes, the Big Necessity, On Bicycles, and The Mesh as part of that series.

Also, last night I watched Bladerunner, which I thought would be a Reads to Reels post. As it happened, the movie references were all subtle, like the offworld settlements and the fake owl. The only major plot element was the lead character’s quest to retire some replicants, but one of the best scenes in the book was a no-show.  I didn’t mind the abstinence of Mercerism, though.  I found it an odd movie, presumably one that improves upon repeated viewings. 

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The Twilight of the Presidency

Posted on January 29, 2017 by smellincoffee

The Twlight of the Presidency: An Examination of Power and Isolation in the White House
© 1970, 1987
200 pages

In Twilight of the Presidency, George Reedy uses his personal experience as a Johnson aide, along with the study of other administrations of the 20th century, to comment on the apparent decline of the US Presidency as an effective force for serving the public good.   Writing in an age that had seen the ill repute of the Johnson and Nixon administrations, followed by the benign but inept administrations of Ford and Carter,  Reedy was pessimistic about the future of the presidency.  In our own age the imperial presidency has revived and waxed even stronger,  to the degree that  American families may hear or mention the president by name more than their own  relations!    Yet for all the time that has passed, Twilight of the Presidency‘s insight into how the presidency as an office works remains incredible.

Reedy refers to the office as an elective monarchy, and maintains it had that potential from the beginning.  Yet except for Abraham Lincoln, no president of the 19th century really used the office to its full  authority.   The essential advantage of the presidency, Reedy writes, is the will to action: the Supreme Court can only decide on such issues arrive at its doorstep, and the Congress is an enormous bureuacracy whose wheels are clogged with corruptive grime.  The president can act on his own accord, can be  — The Decider.    He can seize the initiative and put everyone else on the defense while Congress is still attempting to get a bill from a subcommittee to the floor.     Another advantage in the president’s court is the aura of his office; the American president is simultaneously the head of government and the head of state.  He enjoys much of the reverence given to a figure like Queen Elizabeth the II,  escaping direct personal abuse as someone like Tony Blair or Nick Cameron might have to endure during “Question Period”.

In one chapter, Reedy dwells on more of the monarchical trappings of the office of POTUS: the fact that the chief executive is surrounded by hundreds of people every day, all of whom are fixated on him. They may be White House staff serving his needs so he can focus on the issues of the day,  or enthralled aides waiting for their chance to bask in the royal farr and be noticed.  This bureaucratic cloud has the effect of isolating the president from society at large;  their own opinions being the only ones the president hears. They’re hardly representative: Reedy writes that Johnson couldn’t understand the youth rebellion against him, because all of the young men in his employ were  perfectly at ease with the administration’s current Vietnam policy.    More substantially, Reedy comments that because the host around the president is there to serve and administer his wishes,  he rarely receives pushback from policy suggestions.  (Reedy alleges that the only president of the 20th century who was nearly completely successful at staying connected to the people, instead of being hemmed-in by his advisors, was FDR. )  Reedy comments mournfully that there were numerous times that  the United States might have resisted further entanglement in Indo-China, but when Johnson passively expected alternatives, all he received were alternating views on what his aides thought he wanted to do — stay the course.     Staying the course is almost always the easiest thing to do,  even when considered objectively it’s unwise. Presidents are not objective,  however; they are the subject of national attention, and of history books. They are the face and will of the nation.   If a private citizen makes a mistake that costs him dearly, he is free to cut his losses and walk away with a slightly reddened face and a lighter wallet. But if a President decides engagement in Vietnam or Iraq was a mistake, he has not only wagered money but lives and honor.   To write off the lives of thousands of young men and women is not a task easy to do in a democracy.

The office’s isolation and policy inertia of part of the reason why perfectly intelligent men can make  astonishing missteps in office, whether it’s invading Cuba on bad intelligence, or invading Iraq on….can the WMD threat even be dignified as ‘intelligence’?. Another aspect, though, is the growth of the office itself: we’ve come a long way from Washington and his three secretaries.    Because so much authority has been delegated to executive agencies, it is perfectly possible for people of one department to make pivotal decisions under the aegeis of presidential authority without the executive actually knowing about it.  The bureacracy is now so large that it has institutionalized itself;  it moves under its own inertia, and  a particular department’s  long-running policies and officers can outlive presidents.  This is why Reedy, despite being a Democrat, thinks it is perfectly possible that Iran-Contra could have been created and implemented without Reagan actually knowing in full what was happening.

Twilight is incredibly insightful, and admirable. Although he wrote out of concern for an office  whose efficiency was fast diminishing,  his exposure of why remains true today.  At least in part, that is; I assume the presidency has become even more isolated from the American people because of security concerns.  The 2016 election results, which took D.C. utterly by surprise, may indicate how out of touch the imperial center is with the people beyond the coasts.  I wonder if such a book could be written today: Reedy had the advantage of witnessing or knowing people who remembered the presidency when it was still boring, before  Hoover and Roosevelt made the office a source of daily fixation. Could an author who has grown up with the imperial presidency analyze it in this fashion? I doubt it.

Related:

  • The Cult of the Presidency, Gene Healy, which quoted on this and recommended it to me. 
  • The Once and Future King, F.H. Buckley. Buckley contends that effective monarchy has re-established itself in the form of the American presidency and the prime ministers of the UK and Canada,  echoing some of Reedy’s chapter on the making of the American monarchy. This is one I really must re-read..
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The Forever War

Posted on January 29, 2017 by smellincoffee

The Forever War
© 1974 Joe Haldeman
236 pages

“I called to the waiter, ‘Bring me one of those Antares things’ Sitting here in a bar with an asexual cyborg who is probably the only other normal person on the whole damn planet.” 

Sometimes you just can’t win.  In Joe Haldeman’s The Forever War, Haldeman relies on his experience as an engineer in Vietnam, and his extensive scientific reading, to create a visceral account of war and alienation in the far future.   He begins in the near future, however, in the 1990s, as an Earth which has begun to aggressively explore and colonize the Milky Way via a network of ‘collapsars’ becomes embroiled in a war against another spacefaring power.    Earth has never fought in space before, and since the Vietnam War had actually been tending toward global pacifism. A few veterans from previous wars guide Earth’s policy and martial strategy, however, and so begins a galactic quagmire that will span hundreds of years.   Yet because of the relativistic effects of near-light space travel, Private William Mandela and other troops in the first wave will become aliens to their own people,  aging only a couple of years as the decades pass on Earth.    I am not surprised in the least at Forever War’s enduring reputation for SF  excellence, as Haldeman succeeds brilliantly on multiple fronts.

At the heart of Forever War’s success is the curious consequences of relativistic physics.  Because time passes more slowly the closer a traveler gets to lightspeed,  what seems like weeks to Madella is years on Earth — and the more traveling one does, the more severe the distortions are. Haldeman hints at this early on, when a sergeant who barely looks older than Mandella  takes over their training. After only a couple of years of “subjective” time — that is, Mandella’s experience of time — he returns to Earth to find that decades have passed. His mother is elderly, and Earth is in a grim way.  Culture has changed significantly, too, and Mandella feels like a stranger in a strange land.  Despairing of finding a place on Earth, Mandella and his lover-in-arms Marygay return to the service.  Earth becomes a distant memory, but because the war lasts so long Mandella frequently experiences future shock as he encounters evidence of even more radical transformations in Earth’s culture.  These changes are staggering: the world is united under the authority of the UN, a government on a war footing which attempts to control every aspect of life, with resulting economic and personal depression. “Every aspect” includes sexuality, as homosexuality is used as a method of population control and assumes such prominence that heterosexuality is regarded as tantamount to sociopathy.  Haldeman’s perception of sexuality as fluid and complicated might get him stoned today, for conflicting with the present notions of hard-set “orientations”.  Yet here — as in 1984, as in Brave New World —  this government attempt to rein in the most unruly passion of humanity is resisted.    In the beginnig, Mandella and other soldiers are assigned sexual partners for the night, but tend to gravitate toward one particular partner. Mandella’s only thread of hope, of sanity in a universe constantly changing around him, is his fellow relic and lover Marygay.  

The time dilation also effects the military consequences of the war:   Earth’s soldiers are far better at war in general, but because so much objective time passes between launches and arrivals, the Taurans often seem to be fighting with weapons from the “future”.  Those weapons bear mentioning, because the martial aspects of Forever War are the second big triumph for Haldeman. Frankly, I’ve never read  SF-military combat this interesting.  Key to space soldiering is the Fighting Suit, a skintight unit that protects and augments the body within; later on,  the fighting suits are an early example of technohumanism,  using an access port plugged in above the hip to interact with the body’s systems.   The suits allow for greater effacy and are vital to staying alive in a hostile universe, but they’re not foolproof.  Bumping against a rock of frozen gas might cause a deadly explosion, for instance, and if the suits are damaged in combat they’re likely to cause total user death through overheating and such. Still later “stasis fields” are invented that prevent electro-chemical activity, so  combat within them has to be  the old-fashioned stuff:  swords and arrows.

Virtually everyone who reads this catches the parallel between Haldeman’s soldiers — who return home to find it a foreign country in every way but the name — and returning veterans from Vietnam,  who found not a home but an insane asylum in 1960s-1970s  America.    Although modern readers aren’t traveling at the speed of light, sometimes it seems the world is. We’re all living in various stages of future shock, unless we’re kids for whom new things are simply to be expected, and so Mandella is our man.  I found his story gripping on every level — the science, the combat, and the societal evolution.   Although we’re unlikely to start zipping around the stars anytime soon, several aspects of Haldeman’s future bear thinking about: the control of society and  soldiers through chemicals, especially.

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