Welcome to Show #38!
Yes, we put the promo at the beginning, because once we got rolling on the discussion, we never took a break. ‘Tis why we’re geeks.
Feature Discussion: Summer, David and Jen tackle Joe R. Haldeman’s The Forever War, which was first serialized in Analog magazine in 1972, then published in novel form in 1974. It was the Nebula Award winner in 1975 and the Hugo Award winner in 1976.
Brief Story Description: This is the story of William Mandella, a student who is conscripted into an elite force being trained to fight in Earth’s first extraterrestrial war. The problem is that while they age normally while traversing deep space, time is speeding by faster on Earth. How can you go home again when you’ve aged only a few months or years while the only home you’ve known has aged 50-500-1000 years or more?
Listener Feedback: You can leave comments here for the show, or at the Kick-Ass Mystic Ninjas Forum. You can also email all of us at ninjas-at-kickassmysticninjas-dot-com, and yes, you can also email in recorded commentary.
Books mentioned:
Link: Wikipedia: The Forever War
Link: We Read Science Fiction: The Forever War by Joe Haldeman – Cams #4
Link: Joe Haldeman’s Tangled Website
Promo: Parsec Awards 2008
Not dead. Resting? I’ve...
One of my fav books gets the KAMN treatment, I’m almost afraid to hit the download link..almost.
Thank God you’re back.
OK, don’t take this the wrong way, but I can tell that none of the Ninjas have a background in the armed forces. Here are my quibbles:
1. Training Casualties: Some casualties in training are expected, even in RL. In this case, Haldeman was demonstrating the foolishness of command in insisting on useless, dangerous training, when they had no clear understanding of what the war would be like.
2. The psychic aliens weren’t killed “for no reason.” The soldiers didn’t know what they were. There was discussion in the book about whether or not to kill them. The soldiers killed them because they didn’t know if they were Taurans. They erred to the side of caution.
3. The sketchy beginnings of the war were a reference to the Gulf of Tonkin Incident, which started the Vietnam War, not a logical flaw. That’s just bad reasearch on the part of the Ninjas. I though you guys were old enough to know about Tonkin?
4. Why were they still fighting a bogus war after 1000 years? To quote our current commander in chief, they “Stayed the Course.” We stayed in Vietnam for 10 years, which is longer than the relative time of the protag in this story.
Aside from those, I agree that he put way too much emphasis on sexuality. It realy dated the story, much as the funny sexual references dated Heinlein’s “Stranger in a Strange Land.”
I have to admit that The Forever War was not among my favorite Hugo-award winners. Dystopian military novels just don’t jive with my starry-eyed future optimism.
Regardless, as a good Ninja trainee I’m revisiting the novel (available on Audible.com, though I’m not crazy about the narrator in their version).
Both The Forever War and Forever Peace (1998 Hugo, Nebula & John W. Campbell Memorial Award winner) are available on Audible.
Excellent point about the parallels to today’s military climate.
Did anyone notice that they had Slidewalks? I’m convinced that all good Sci-Fi cities must have slidewalks, or dirigibles, or a relativistic dilemma. Fortunately this novel has all three.
Good pick crew.
That’s funny, my teenage son can tell about the lack of ninja training, as well.
I’ll chime in on the realistic training (and casualties thereof). “Train as you’ll fight”. Now we can’t use real bullets and such (despite what a certain movie supposedly based on Gulf War I tried to show…), but we train with “MILES” gear (laser tag…but up to tanks and such), lots of PT, long marches, crawling in the mud, etc. If you don’t stress the people during training and teach them what they are capable of (as well as teaching you important skills like attention to detail–gee, you were not watching and did not latch your helmet all the way, oh well!), then you’ll have casualties during the real thing. Look at “The Children’s Crusade” or soldiers marching off from their homes to the first battle of Bull Run thinking it would be picnic.
Starship Troopers: Some of the comments during the show made me think that the speakers had only seen **the movie** and not read the book. The two are **very different**. For one thing, Heinlein talks about you getting the “franchise” (ability to vote) by doing civic service. A forest ranger would have gotten the vote, a firefighter, a teacher, possibly even non-governmental civic workers; volunteering to work in a third-world nation, perhaps. More than the “military” got the vote.
A MilSF classic that you should look up: “Armor” by John Steakley (DAW, 1984 edition is the most recent one I have). Makes a good counterpoint to both of these (Heinlein and Haldeman).