Vintage Voyages: The Forever War

A nebula in the constellation Taurus. Image credit: NASA, ESA, Hubble, R. Sahai (JPL)

"Back in the twentieth century, they had established to everybody's satisfaction that 'I was just following orders' was an inadequate excuse for inhuman conduct... but what can you do when the orders come from deep down in that puppet master of the unconscious?"

-- Joe Haldeman, The Forever War

With war at the top of the news, I found myself thinking of Joe Haldeman's Hugo- and Nebula-award winning novel The Forever War. It's sometimes shorthanded as an anti-war novel, but importantly, I never felt the soldier characters were treated as straw men, at least as far as my years-old recollection tells me. Rather, the effects of war are shown in the toll it takes on the warriors, a reality that Haldeman, a Vietnam veteran, experienced firsthand. This immediacy puts The Forever War in the company of such soldier-authored books as The Things They Carried which dramatize the damage war does its veterans in body and mind.

The Forever War tells the story of a centuries-long interstellar struggle between humanity and the mysterious Taurans, all through the eyes of a single soldier, William Mandella. Haldeman uses a clever device to let his viewpoint character see the long span of the war, and the story is built around it.

In the universe of the novel it's discovered that collapsars (another name for black holes, although I'm not 100% clear if Haldeman is referring to the same thing here) can safely be used as gateways between different parts of the galaxy. This allows for a kind of faster-than-light drive, but an entirely natural one, and one which humans can exploit but not reproduce. Where this would have big implications for travelers is twofold, and both related to Einstein's theories of relativity: getting near a black hole puts you in regions of spacetime where your personal time slows relative to Earth's, and just getting to a black hole requires ships moving close to the speed of light, which also slows down the passage of time for the traveler.

Of necessity then, an interstellar soldier is estranged from the home front, because he (or she) is a historical relic after just one mission.

This isn't just interestingly science fictional, it ramps up the real-world disconnect veterans experience on returning from wars. And usefully for storytelling, it lets a single voice cover centuries of conflict. Mandella's personal story is also a history of the Tauran War, from its early stages to its finish. He witnesses constant changes in technology and society, feeling more and more alienated. Only the military and the war offer any kind of stability, but at a dehumanizing cost.

The Forever War is also a love story, as Mandella's only enduring personal connection is to a fellow soldier. My strongest memory of the book is a scene in which Mandella's lover is suffering a slow but deadly injury as a result of a damaged acceleration tank. The tank should be protecting her body from the effects of high-speed maneuvers, but in fact the ship's rapid movement is killing her. I recall reading this scene alone on a night flight. I had a window seat and was pressed against a cold bulkhead, the view outside showing only the airplane's wing and the darkness. I had a vivid sense of humanity -- fleshy, bloody, and vulnerable -- hitched to fantastic and deadly machines. That harsh image of space travel has never left me, for all my romanticized ideas of adventure on other planets.

Though the novel has many dark moments, the book does reach a fairly positive conclusion, both for the couple and for a very changed humanity. But it's a grim ride.

As an aside, Haldeman's model of slower-than-light ships taking advantage of a previously existing faster-than-light network has become popular in science fiction. I can understand why. It allows the human technology to be fairly explicable within science-as-we-know-it, while still making it possible to zip characters off to distant solar systems in a relative hurry. Variations of this concept appear in Joan D. Vinge's Snow Queen cycle, Lois McMaster Bujold's Vorkosigan Saga, and Vonda N. McIntyre's Starfarers Quartet. It also appears in the roleplaying games Diaspora and Shock: Human Contact.

And speaking of games, The Forever War inspired at least two wargames: a licensed game of ground combat and Warp War, a space combat game.

Update: Added links.

Vintage Voyages: Mercurian Memories

(image source: http://solarsystem.nasa.gov/)

NASA's MESSENGER (MErcury Surface, Space ENvironment, GEochemistry and Ranging) space probe began orbiting Mercury last week, a first that makes a good inspiration for a first post.

"Goblins in the Library" is a blogging experiment, and a chance to talk about some of my favorite things -- science fiction, fantasy, children's books, libraries, games, and maybe other stuff too. "Vintage Voyages" will be one of the repeating themes, a look at science fiction of earlier decades.

Back in the 1970s, when I first got into reading science fiction, MESSENGER's predecessors were giving us wonderful information about the true nature of the solar system. But the pictures from the Mariners and other probes had the bittersweet effect of drawing the curtain on the pulp era of solar system stories, those days of swamps on Venus, canals on Mars, and a Mercury that was tidally locked and always aiming one face at the sun, and the other at the darkness.

In some ways the tidally locked Mercury was the strangest of those worlds, because many depictions imagined a thin livable zone of twilight between hemispheres of blazing heat and freezing dark. Leigh Brackett's space hero Eric John Stark grew up on this version of Mercury, toughened by the presumed harshness of this barely habitable strip -- as did Captain John MacShard, the hero of Michael Moorcock's more recent wild homage to planetary romance, "The Lost Sorceress of the Silent Citadel" -- "He remained as fierce and free as in the days when, as a boy, he had scrabbled for survival over the unforgiving waste of rocky crags and slag slopes that was Mercury and from the disparate blood of two planets had built a body which could withstand the cruel climate of a third."

I've never read the stories about Stark, or about his peer, C.L. Moore's Northwest Smith, but some of my first science fiction reading was about a spiritual descendent of theirs. The astonishingly prolific Isaac Asimov wrote a series of "juveniles" about Lucky Starr, Space Ranger, set in the usual inhabited solar system, but with somewhat more science than the pulp-style adventures they honored. In Lucky Starr and the Big Sun of Mercury, there's a twilight zone, though it's not habitable, and it's the site of an energy-tapping experiment. Enemies of the Solar System are out to sabotage the project, in an adventure involving an abandoned mine, rock creatures, and a deranged robot. It's got adventure, action, and the Three Laws of Robotics. I don't remember much about the plot now, but I remember enjoying the vision of the blazing dayside and the frozen nightside, and I remember wanting to be as clever a kid as Starr.

By contrast, when Clark Ashton Smith wrote an earlier Mercury story, he made his twilight band more habitable. But in a monster-filled Smithian universe you're probably safer on a lifeless world anyway. In "The Immortals of Mercury" the hero leaves the comparative safety of the twilight band, narrowly escapes burning on the bright side, suffers an underground journey in alien-occupied catacombs, and emerges to freedom -- on the deadly dark side.

As sort of a coda to the idea of a tidally-locked Mercury, Larry Niven set his first published story "The Coldest Place" on the supposed night-side, coyly keeping the actual locale of "the coldest place in the solar system" a secret until the very end. I originally assumed the setting was Pluto, which was then believed to be the outermost world -- as was no doubt the intent.

Niven was almost too late out the door with "The Coldest Place," which according to Wikipedia was published shortly after astronomers concluded Mercury wasn't tidally locked after all. Since then Mercury has been a less romantic place in fiction, though still a possible site for adventures. Stephen Baxter's noted story "Cilia-of-Gold" is set on Mercury. Ben Bova set a recent novel there as well.

But Mercury seems less of interest to science fiction writers than in pulpier days, perhaps because of all the wonders revealed further out in our Solar System -- ice-moons with possible hidden seas, a world of methane lakes, and a Mars that, while barren, looks a smidgen more hospitable now than it did after the first wave of probes.

But I suspect MESSENGER will draw a few more writers back to the first planet. Every time there's a close look at a place in the solar system, new surprises emerge. Mercury has some startling properties -- a strong magnetic field, a long "tail" of particles, and the possible presence of ice in permanently shadowed craters. No doubt there will be many more surprises to draw paper explorers back to the innermost planet.