The Forever War
About a week or so ago I finished reading The Forever War by Joe Haldeman, who I had never heard of before and it turned out to be one of my favourite books. I heard about it via Felicia Day via her blog and it won the Hugo Award in 1976, I am reading a lot of book recently from this award.
It is different to Clarke's style, and has a much more bleak outlook on the future, but poses some fascinating questions and things to think about, and it is about me...sort of. It discusses the inhumanity of inter-stellar war against an alien race no-one has ever seen before, sent there by some large unfeeling government of the world, and then having to deal with 'future shock' when the soldiers return due to the effect of time dilation.
Basic outline: in the future (technically our past, book is old) a wormhole like effect is discovered allowing ships to travel thousands of light years is a split second, however to get to these 'collapsars' the ships travel at near light speed, causing huge relativistic effects. Only soldiers of extremely high intellectual abilities are recruited to fight in this war, conscripted under military legislation after the takeover of all of Earth's governments by the military.
The war is bloody and dangerous and pointless, men die, lives are ruined and for no particular reason. They keep on fighting because of psycho-training, implanting notions of the enemy being evil killing babies and raping women etc. etc.
However the main plot points of the book revolve around the travel at near to light speed everywhere, resulting in extreme time dilation. So the solders were never sure exactly what they were going to be up against because the enemy was also suffering from the same effects. A few months of travel from the crews perspective could be several decades to the outside world, and imagine fighting a war today with the technology from the 1950s.
The space battles were quite cool too, very realistic. When there are eventually wars in space it will not be in Star Trek style, where you fly around in any direction you please, it will be more like naval maneuvers, with all things directed by orbits and initial velocities. You will fight by predicting the enemy's path and altering your orbit and momentum to intercept or avoid. This will be made even more complicated by the application of relativity. I remember reading something about this on Digg a while back, I will try and find it again.
But anyway, the book talks about this very well, realism and ergo believability usually make thing better. (no light speed / sound in space etc. etc.)
Then on top of all this there was a love story. The main character of the book meets a woman while at training camp, and they end up on several mission together and get injured together, they go back to earth together etc. etc. (Their trip back to eart could have been an entire book by itself, the world has descended into chaos, with the stress of this interstellar war, it is dangerous and overcrowded and everything is rationed with the only currency being calories.) they eventually end up in Love, only to be separated by both space and time (those pesky relativistic effects again) by the military. Him sent on a 700 year mission, her on a 500 year one. However it is revealed at the end that they eventually find each other again with the help of relativistic time dilation.
There is a second book, Forever Free, but it generally has bad review. However there is also an associated book Forever Peace, while not related is set in the same universe and it won the Hugo Award too,
It was a generally awesome book, and I want to read more like it. It reminded me of The Amber Spyglass, and the whole His Dark Materials Trilogy, in more ways than one. I highly recommend reading it, I have an electronic copy if anyone wants to borrow it.
Next up: Starship troopers. I have seen the film, and have just started reading the book and it is all good so far.
After that: Little Brother