Forever Free

This book is (I think) a worthy sequel to Forever War. Although the story gets a little tedious in the middle, it explodes towards the end. And the author's writing is as compact and refreshing as ever. If you are familiar with later works of Mark Twain, you will see the similarities in the plot from the _Mysterious Stranger_, one of Twain's last novellas.

As I age, I find the universe becomes stranger and stranger. Was it always that way, or do I just notice it more these days? Haldeman's characters have survived the end of their world. It's not just the lack of Led Zep on the radio; their whole species has become a guy named Man, who probably listens to ABBA. Sitting around the cold planet Middle Finger and listening to the fish grow is no one's idea of retirement. Would you bug out if you could? I'd bug out of the whole universe if I could, and maybe you can, at least in this book. OK, it's not a sex novel; Mandella's faithful to Marygay. He does get to put on his suit and shoot up Disneyworld, but it's just not the same when you come back as an adult... If you expected a rerun of the 70's-angst-laced FOREVER WAR, you'd be better off checking out FOREVER PEACE. And when the answers are finally in, the god-forsaken world of Middle Finger seems like a safe haven after all. Read the book, pitiful humans, and quit complaining.

The Forever War didn't last forever. Now everyone who survived is a living fossil, building a dispirited human colony on the frozen and dull god-forsaken world known as Middle Finger as an alternative to joining the multi-brained group mind called Man which inhabits every human being on Earth. William Mandella and his wife Marygay find that their midlife crisis is going to be as unique as their youth, as fish-farming icy waters palls and the colony seems more and more like a cage of lab rats. Their children are flirting with joining Man's collective mind, and Man himself is intrusive and superior. Time for a road trip in a fast machine, and one more big time loop for the veterans seems in order; a leap into the future when Man is either improved or gone altogether. Man thinks it's a good idea, but the Tauran group-mind recoils in horror from such a violation of physics. The trip is made anyway, but ends disastrously. The entire fabric of the universe seems to be disintegrating as the veterans search an empty world for clues. Haldeman is always concerned with human nature: why do we fight? why do we live in peace? The very kind of group-understanding and mind-sharing that is mankind's hope at the end of _Forever Peace_ is depicted as a dead-end here in the identical 'zombies' of Man. Will the things that make us human destroy us in the end? Can we change? SHOULD we change? Perhaps some Deus Ex Machina will drop in on a string and tell us one day, or maybe we'll figure it out by reading Haldeman.

Rarely is a novel written for fans of the novel's protagonist. Anybody who got to know and empathize with William Mandella will totally love this book. If you never read Forever War, you need to read it first and if you want to see how Mandella turns out later in life, then buy Forever Free. Mr. Haldeman has a great story here about the Veterans of the Forever War and their life with the future MAN. The last half of the story can leave you cold if you can't suspend enough disbelief to just enjoy the story. Of course, if you can't read about fantastic realms with different versions of reality than you are used too, you might not want to read Science Fiction