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
Books + Welcome
So, I am going to attempt to start this thing up, I am paying actual money for it after all.
I have been playing around with the RSS, and it may or may not be working. It also may or may not show up as a button on the site. However you should all get chrome and install the extension that puts a little RSS button on the url bar to solve this problem. Or click this link: RSS it has a 50/50 chance of being the right thing.
I am also going to play around with the settings and the themes to make things generally better. This will do for now though.
So, I have just read some books, and they were pretty awesome, so I thought I would tell others about them and help spread the awesome around.
I read 2001 while in the states, my first Arthur C Clarke book, it was a bit of a slow start but this seems to be a pretty common thing in his books (based on the two I have read). It starts off describing how an unseen alien race uses their advanced technology to explore other worlds, including earth, and push the indigenous population, in the case early man, in the right direction in evolutionary terms. Jump forward to 1999 and they discover some of the alien tech on the moon, which when uncovered sends a signal to the other side of Saturn. So obviously someone goes an jumps in a space ship and follows the signal, it takes 18 months but they finally get close, and this is where the 'story' starts. I will leave things there because I really don't want to ruin things for y'all, I am sure you all know enough about HAL from various parodies to know roughly what happens.
This seems to be a common story telling method for Clarke, and it is a pretty damn good one. A long set up with loads of irrelevant details to the history behind the subject of the story, which ultimately has little effect on the actually 'story' part of the book, but just makes things more relevant, you become more engrossed in the universe the book is trying to tell you about.
2001 was an epic book, and I think it's sequel 2010 may be next for me to read.
More recently I have read another Arthur C Clarke book, "The Fountains of Paradise", and it had a very similar story telling structure. The first part of the book was set in a mythical Kingdom 2000 or so years ago, then jumps forward to the building of a space elevator and then forward again to when there are many space elevators all connected by a giant orbital ring housing most of the remaining human population of earth. Around this was weaved a sub plot of humanity's first encounter with an alien race, an automated probe sent from a star system 52 light years away on an impossibly long mission to explore the stars. Anyway, I am not going to regurgitate the plot, you can read the book for that, or at the very least Wikipedia.
The future spoken about was one that really appealed to me, one where these giant engineering projects actually took place, but as a whole the world was roughly the same. There were still financial and political problems to be overcome, there was no never ending war, no huge social unrest to speak of, it was just as if you took today's society and put it 100 years in the future. This is very unlike "The Forever War", which is coming up next....
Apologies for my less than amazing writing, but it is not something I do too often and is one of the reason I am going to do this sort of thing more. I figure if I write a page or so of 'stuff' every week then eventually I will get better at writing. Make sense?
Expect to read about generally random things that interest me and may or may not interest you and the rest of the internet.