Forever War Game [BOX SET] [Paperback]

Mayfair Games (Author), Joe W. Haldeman (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 1983

Private William Mandella is a hero in spite of himself -- a reluctant conscript drafted into an elite military unit, and propelled through space and time to fight in a distant thousand-year conflict. He never wanted to go to war, but the leaders on Earth have drawn a line in the interstellar sand -- despite the fact that their fierce alien enemy is unknowable, unconquerable, and very far away. So Mandella will perform his duties without rancor and even rise up through the military's ranks . . . if he survives. But the true test of his mettle will come when he returns to Earth. Because of the time dilation caused by space travel the loyal soldier is aging months, while his home planet is aging centuries -- and the difference will prove the saying: you never can go home. . .

--This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

In the 1970s Joe Haldeman approached more than a dozen different publishers before he finally found one interested in The Forever War. The book went on to win both the Hugo and Nebula Awards, although a large chunk of the story had been cut out before it saw publication. Now Haldeman and Avon Books have released the definitive version of The Forever War, published for the first time as Haldeman originally intended. The book tells the timeless story of war, in this case a conflict between humanity and the alien Taurans. Humans first bumped heads with the Taurans when we began using collapsars to travel the stars. Although the collapsars provide nearly instantaneous travel across vast distances, the relativistic speeds associated with the process means that time passes slower for those aboard ship. For William Mandella, a physics student drafted as a soldier, that means more than 27 years will have passed between his first encounter with the Taurans and his homecoming, though he himself will have aged only a year. When Mandella finds that he can't adjust to Earth after being gone so long from home, he reenlists, only to find himself shuttled endlessly from battle to battle as the centuries pass. --Craig E. Engler --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Review

"To say that The Forever War is the best science fiction war novel ever written is to damn it with faint praise. It is, for all its techno-extrapolative brilliance, as fine and woundingly genuine a war story as any I've read."
--William Gibson, author of Neuromancer, Spook Country

"There are a handful of moments when an American science fiction novel abruptly and seemingly effortlessly satisfied every possible expectation conveyed not only by the genre's ambitions, but of those of the whole literary landscape with which it was contemporary: Sturgeon's More Than Human, Dick's The Man In The High Castle, LeGuin's Dispossessed, Gibson's Neuromancer. The Forever War is one such book, and like those others still carries with it that air of recognition and possibility."
--Jonathan Lethem, author of Gun With Occcasional Music, Fortress of Solitude

"Perhaps the most important war novel written since Vietnam . .  . Haldeman, a veteran, is a flat-out visionary . . . and protagonist William Mandella's attempt to survive and remain human in the face of an absurd almost endless war is harrowing hilarious heartbreaking and true  . . . like all the best works of literature THE FOREVER WAR takes you apart and then, before you can turn that last page, puts you back together: better, wiser, more human.  Simply extraordinary."
--Junot Diaz, Pulitzer Prize winning author of The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

"If there was a Fort Knox for Science Fiction writers, we'd have to lock Joe Haldeman up."
--Stephen King, author of The Shining, The Dead Zone, The Stand

"The Forever War is not just a great Science Fiction novel, it's a great Vietnam war novel - and a great war novel, without qualification- that is also Science Fiction.  A classic to grace either genre."
--Iain M. Banks, author of Use of Weapons, The Player of Games, Matter

"FOREVER WAR is brilliant--one of the most influential war novels of our time. That it happens to be set in the future only broadens and enhances its message."
--Greg Bear, author of Moving Mars, Eon, The Forge of God

“A parable whose lessons are needful learning once more.”
--John Scalzi, author of Old Man’s War, The Ghost Brigades, Zoe’s Tale

"I first read this twenty years ago and have never forgotten the wonder and fury it kindled at the time.  Anyone who talks about the glory of war has obviously never read it.  A beautifully detailed and intensely personal account of a conflict which lasts for over a thousand years, as told by one grunt who lives through it all.  Only a writer as skillfull and knowledgeable as Haldeman could use war's dark glamour to lure the reader in and then deplou the sam fascination to show just what kind of effect this orchestrated barbarism can have on the human soul."
--Peter F. Hamilton, author of Pandora’s Star, Judas Unchained, The Dreaming Void

“In a literature of ideas, The Forever War is a titan: a book filled with mind-bending ideas about relatavistic time-distortion and world-shaking ideas about the futility of war. In today's world, where we think declaring war on abstract nouns like TERROR is a winning strategy, we need THE FOREVER WAR."
--Cory Doctorow, author of Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, Little Brother X

“It is to the Vietnam War what Catch-22 was to World War II, the definitive, bleakly comic satire.”
--Thomas M. Disch, author of Camp Concentration, 334

"The Forever War does what the very best science fiction does. It deals with extremes both societal and teleological; it places a frame around humankind's place in the universe to show us what is outside the frame; and it functions simultaneously at the literal and metaphorical level.  Inarguably one of the genre's great novels, it is also among the finest novels ever written about war."
--James Sallis, author of The Long Legged Fly, Drive, Cripple Creek

--This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback
• Publisher: Mayfair Games (August 1983)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0425066223
• ISBN-13: 978-0425066225
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #5,720,157 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)