The Forever War

AUTHOR’S NOTE

This is the definitive version of The Forever War. There are two other versions, and my publisher has been kind enough to allow inc to clarify things here.

The one you’re holding in your hand is the book as it was originally written. But it has a pretty tortuous history.

It’s ironic, since it later won the Hugo and Nebula Awards, and has won “Best Novel” awards in other countries, but The Forever War was not an easy book to sell back in the early seventies. It was rejected by eighteen publishers before St. Martin’s Press decided to take a chance on it. “Pretty good book,” was the usual reaction, “but nobody wants to read a science fiction novel about Vietnam”. Twenty-five years later, most young readers don’t even see the parallels between The Forever War and the seemingly endless one we were involved in at the time, and that’s okay. It’s about Vietnam because that’s the war the author was in. But it’s mainly about war, about soldiers, and about the reasons we think we need them.

While the book was being looked at by all those publishers, it was also being serialized piecemeal in Analog magazine. The editor, Ben Bova, was a tremendous help, not only in editing, but also for making the thing exist at all! He gave it a prominent place in the magazine, and it was also his endorsement that brought it to the attention of St. Martin’s Press, who took a chance on the hardcover, though they did not publish adult science fiction at that time.

But Ben rejected the middle section, a novella called “You Can Never Go Back.” He liked it as a piece of writing, he said, but thought that it was too downbeat for Analog’s audience. So I wrote him a more positive story and put “You Can Never Go Back” into the drawer; eventually Ted White published it in Amazing magazine, as a coda to The Forever War.

At this late date, I’m not sure why I didn’t reinstate the original middle when the book was accepted. Perhaps I didn’t trust my own taste, or just didn’t want to make life more complicated. But that first book version is essentially the Analog version with “more adult language and situations”, as they say in Hollywood.

The paperback of that version stayed in print for about sixteen years. (It has a white cover showing a guy in a spacesuit with a sword, with symbolic clocks all around.)

Then, in 1991, Avon Books outbid its competitors and won the right to publish the book. The editors agreed to let me reinstate my original version. But alas, not all of the changes got in, and the book had some internal contradictions because of things left over from the earlier one. (The cover of that one has a futuristic soldier who looks like Robin Williams in a funny hat.)

This version, finally, has everything restored — with a less funny cover illustration. The dates in the book are now kind of funny; most people realize we didn’t get into an interstellar war in 1996. I originally set it in that year so it was barely possible that the officers and NCOs could be veterans of Vietnam, so we decided to leave it that way, in spite of the obvious anachronisms. Think of it as a parallel universe.

But maybe it’s the real one, and we’re in a dream.

Joe Haldeman

Cambridge, Massachusetts