Customer Reviews

The Battle of Forever

5 star:		(0)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
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First of all - It's one of Van-Vogt's most ideas-filled books. If you've read Van-Vogt before you know that a comment like that is not to be taken lightly.

Writen in 1970 and being rather "new" in Vogtian standarts , I was afraid that Van has gotten old , lost his zest , and boy , how wrong was I !

From the first word I was captivated in the story of Modyun - a far future human man that has a 30cm body and a 15inch diameter head. Modyun , who's a telepath and a genius using 100% of his brain's potential like all other humans ( who numbers a mere 1000 )decides to enlarge his body to the original size of the ancient humans , and take a tour around the world , to see how the animal-men are doing.

The animal-men , ofcourse , were created by Man by mixing every animal's DNA with human's inorder to give them intelligence. When that was achived , Man has built the animal-men cities and food-commisary's and factories to fulfill every need , and that done - reduced his number to a representative 1000 and began passing time in emotion-free , stimulant-free , totaly peacfull philosophic existance.

When Modyun encounters the world outside the human valley , he has many enlightment's on the way "ancient man" use to think and feel , and the way the body , not the brain , was mostly responsible for those feelings because of the number and intensity of the stimulations over-flowing into the mind and interfere with rational thought. Besides fighting his own bodily sensations , Modyun is noticing a diference in the way the world is run ! He begins his investigations and does have some success but the thing that holds him back is really his own attitude - after hundread's of years of peacfull existance , Modyun is almost uncapable of identifying a violent situation , not to mention a suspicion of scheming !

I won't tell you what Modyun finds out and how he deal's with it , but I'll tell you that though : this book is a wonderfull exemple of the mind-expanding works Van-Vogt give us every once in a while. It might have been his greatest , if the end would'nt have been a bit rushed - hence the four stars. But anyway , It's an excellent book , and you should read it if you're an early sci-fi lover , an A.E Van-Vogt fan , or a person interested in having a wonderfull reading experience.

Very recommended.

I read Van Vogt's book when I was a kid and loved the idea of an 'advanced' human race with big heads and small bodies (I hear the 1960's song "In the year 2525" in my head) alongside a furry race of sentient animal-men. I'm cooking-up a sci-fi screenplay that gives a nod to the story, and I hope it gives the director the idea to get "Battle of Forever" produced.

My eighth van Vogt novel to-date, I do consider myself a fan merely because of his wide range of pulp novels, which spur on my readership through the years of reading. His novels may be short (The Battle of Forever being only 173 pages long), his stories are always centered around an interesting theme which he tends to explore in unique ways. My favorite, of course, is Voyage of the Space Beagle but Battle of Forever shares nothing in likeness to Voyage. Rather, it has more in common with Man With a Thousand Names. The likeness includes the shifting of mindsets from the viewpoint of a single narrator... the narrator unknowingly changing realities.

Battle of Forever is simply a miserable title; easy to forget and reflects every little from the story. It has to be one of the worst titles for a sci-fi novel (right behind Philip K. Dick's Zap Gun, Robert Silverberg's Those Who Watch and E.E. Smith's The Skylark of Space [none of which I remotely enjoyed]).

Modyun is a modified human living in the Ylem where all 1,000 humans live a multi-millennial philosophical existence. When the question of what is happening to the sentient man-animals the humans left behind, Modyun is set out to inhabit a human body and discover what has become of the world they departed so long ago. As four beast-men befriend the naïve Modyun, passing himself as an ape as there are no longer any humans to be found in the flesh, he experiences a shift in the laws the humans had left the animal-men to follow... which is where the story begins.

Finding that the hyena-men have taken the role of an unnecessary government, Modyun later finds the pusher of the move- the Nunuli race who conquered earth before humans hermetically secluded themselves. Behind this alien race is yet another race with a hidden agenda and so forth and so on. Modyun finds himself aboard a spaceship, the same ship employing his four friends, where they are off on a predestined route to search for new worlds to conquer.

The story begins to lose a lot of steam when the ship finally reaches a planet. I liked the story of dealing with alien bureaucracy but having to shift between true reality and perceived reality (is those are the right words to be chosen) is a tedious business which should be left to a much thicker novel (like Banks' Transition). The last ten percent, especially, the reader must be vigilant about the mindsets of the entire cast, who can play who and which means to an end need to be met, etc. It might just scramble your brain or just chuck it in the bin. I stuck it out and kind of shrugged.

So, like Man of a Thousand Names this novel is a bit trippy but with more ideas crammed into the future history. I liked the future history of the novel, it IS quite unique but I just wish the plot wouldn't had been so spastic, far-flung. A nice terrestrial sci-fi never hurt anyone. SO, a must for any van Vogt fan but a polite pass for the non-so keen reader.