Thursday, 9 November 2023

Book review: the Forever War

PXL_20231108_205142378~2 A nice little blast from the old days. Goodreads likes it, as it should (my recollection is that the rest of the series is duff, though). Its kinda hardish scifi, overlaid on Vietnam-type US soldierly thinking (e.g. to improve morale, the army has mandated that the soldiers say "fuck you sir" when dismissed).

The hardish element largely works, as long as you don't peer too closely (finding planets around a collapsar would be pretty tricky, why would you build a base on one anyway when you could more conveniently operate in space; I think he's a bit casual about quite what accelerations are in place; I never even tried to check if his mooted accelerations matched the distances / times required. Oh, and while his spaceships have engines capable of generating n gravities thrust, those are the main engines, and wouldn't be capable of manoevering at anything like that thrust).

The fighting described is a sort of sketch of how such fighting might go; it is a fairly short book so the details are thin, but this is OK; you can supply your own.

The final twist is nice, and adds to the pointlessness of the whole thing, which is so to speak the point.

Oh yeah the title: due to time dilation on the way to the jumps, much objective-so-to-speak time passes. This gets him a bit of social commentary on how-things-change. His guesses now don't look so good (general homosexuality to avoid overpopulation is fun, but doesn't now look plausible), but again this is not real problem. The idea of collapsing down to just one clone now doesn't seem like a very good idea from any perspective, particularly genetic diversity but also diversity of thought.


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