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Forever Free
Joe Haldeman
Gollancz hardback, 277 pages, £16.99
Review by Mike Don (2000)

At last, the true sequel to Forever War. Bill Mandella and Marygay Potter survived the war, but returned to an Earth whose culture has changed so far as to be uncomfortable, and to a culture equally uncomfortable with the vets, regarding them as anachronistic, primitive throwbacks. In SF terms, humanity has bootstrapped to a form of hive mind, and relativistic effects mean that the vets are indeed a literal anachronism. But I suspect that in mundane terms, Vietnam vets will recognise the metaphor.

Exiled by choice to a barely habitable colony world, Mandella and friends plan a solution not available to their historical Vietnam vet equivalents. It’s difficult to be more specific here without issuing a Spoiler alert: suffice it to say that Mandella finds God – or a reasonable facsimile thereof – who is revealed to be a practical joker with a seriously warped sense of humour.

The latter part of Forever Free puzzled me at first. A fine mystery, but an apparent change of style, from gritty realism to a climax which can best be described as black farce! However, it struck me that to an American audience, far more familiar than us heathen Brits with hellfire preachers rabbiting on about the Rapture, Haldeman’s black humour will be instantly identifiable. And, very possibly, some of them will fail to see the joke which is, after all, at their expense.

Forever Free may not reach the classic status of Forever War – sequels rarely do – but it is still compulsively readable, both as SF and as a dry, ultimately black comment on life. And Haldeman’s take on the idea of humanity developing a collective, ‘consensus’ consciousness makes for an intriguing, and far more cautionary, comparison with Peter F Hamilton’s ‘Edenism’ (or, indeed, Haldeman’s own utopian vision in Forever Peace). Recommended.