Customer Reviews

Forever War: Marvano : Private Mandella

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The Forever War is the literary counterweight to Robert Heinlein's Starship Troopers, depicting a war with an alien species that's as pointless and horrific as most human wars. As Earth sends its first colony ships into space, one is destroyed by a newly-encountered alien race. Humankind retaliates by creating an elite military force, including the story's protagonist, and sending it to attack the aliens' base. Thus begins an interstellar conflict of attack and counterattack. Haldeman and Marvano present the war in decidedly un-heroic terms, an endless cycle of senseless massacre being waged without clear reason, in which soldiers are little more than disposable cogs in the machine. For every few months the main character spends in space, decades go by on Earth, making the society that sent him to war more and more unrecognizable to him (if this a metaphor for the disconnect that Vietnam-era servicemen like Haldeman felt, it's a pretty effective one). Still, he must face each successive stage in a chilling, unstoppable technological arms race that continues between the two warring species.

Though I haven't yet read Haldeman's original novel, this graphic novelization of it is superb. The bright, simple palette of colors provide an interesting visual contrast to the bleakness of the story. The characters are expressive without being overdone, the backgrounds capture the mechanical sterility of spacecraft and the vast barrenness of planetary surfaces, and the action scenes suitably reflect the confusion of combat. The late 80s look is a bit dated, but not distractingly so. While some characters and scenes seem to have been trimmed down from ones that had greater significance in the original book, nothing feels like it's missing from the story being told. With so many hyped-up, "heroic" graphic novels and comic books on the market that are ostensibly about war, usually created by people who have never seen a weapon used for its true purpose, this is a genuinely affecting anti-war allegory from someone who has.

Joe Haldeman did it again. His vision and writeing style is a pleasure to read