Brilliant example of military science fiction. ( )

A totally competent exploration of an interesting idea. ( )

Lonely hero - tragic circumstances - lovely tale we’ll told ( )

I picked this up a while back, but only just got around to it. A bad habit. It's a story of a space war based on the Vietnam war, with which the author had had recent experience. It's funny to think, but the story was envisioned to start in 1997, when the narrator is shipped out to "Charon", Haldeman's name for the 10th planet beyond Pluto, which gave me a start - the real Charon, Pluto's moon, hadn't been discovered in 1974 when this book was published.

One theme of the book is satirizing the war that America was still fruitlessly fighting at the time of publication, and another theme was coming back to civilization after years out of it - time dilation means the characters spend mere months travelling around while years pass back on Earth. Haldeman's prediction of the 2010s or 2020s is in some ways off-the-mark, but in others, frighteningly accurate. He pretty much predicts smartphone zombies, right on the nose. On the other hand, an essentially lawless society where one literally requires a bodyguard just to step outside? Not quite, but I've heard parts of the USA are getting to that point.

Going much further into the future, Haldeman predicts something more like [b: Brave New World|5479|Brave New World / Brave New World Revisited|Aldous Huxley|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1331315450s/5479.jpg|39947767] (incidentally, I read that book after this one - just finished as of writing this review - and am realizing only now that these ideas have been around for a long time), where humans are produced by a cloning-like method, and everyone's made gay as a method of contraception against unwanted pregnancy. At this point, the narrator and his contemporaries are made to feel ostracized for being heterosexual.

I ... really don't know what to think about this. The rest of the book was good enough - easy to read, lightly funny, and well-characterized even when the main set of characters changes several times over the course of the book. And I get that this seems to be a narrative device to isolate the main character from his time. But I'm deeply offended by the suggestion that it takes but a prick of some hormone injection to make one's orientation flip, or by the idea of gays genuinely ostracizing heteros or - !!! - calling them "queer" in an odd reversal of the term. Is Haldeman letting his homophobia show? Or was he trying to say something else?

I'm only going to deduct one star, though, because the sci-fi stuff was outlandish and cool. ( )

While some of the cultural "choices" were a bit farfetched ("homosex") and a bit dated, as a metaphor for what war does to both the participants and society it holds up well. ( )