The Forever War by Joe Haldeman is one of the landmark science fiction novels of the 1970s and won the Hugo and Nebula Awards for Best Novel of 1975. It's hard to believe that after it was serialized in Analog, and reprinted in both the Harrison & Aldiss and Terry Carr's Year's Best Science Fiction, it was still rejected as a novel by no less than seventeen publishers before St. Martin's Press took a chance and published it. The copy reviewed (ISBN 978-0312536633, 288pp) is the 'full' version, including one section rejected by Analog, but picked up by editor Ted White for Amazing Stories.
Hero
The first section was originally published as 'Hero' in Analog in 1972, and was Hugo nominated after two different Year's Bests included it. In 1996 humanity makes contact with an alien race dubbed the Taurans, after the sector of space in which they met. Things go wrong, with human colony ships going missing and scare stories of massacres; before long humanity is waging its first interstellar war.
Troop ships dive into collapsars and emerge almost instantly (to the traveller) elsewhere in the universe, although years have elapsed subjectively (so if a human 'jumps' from Earth to Alpha Centauri 4.3 light years away, four years will elapse for each way, but to the traveller returning to Earth after eight years absence, almost no time will have passed).
'Hero' is very much the coming-of-age story for Private William Mandella, the tale of his training and first battle in 1997, and is told in a low-key matter-of-fact tone that makes some of the things that his own superiors do to him all the more shocking (one is to implant a hypnotic command that turns the troops into berserkers who massacre all Taurans, even those who don't appear to pose a threat.
Analog Science Fiction / Fact
'We Are Very Happy Here' was the sequel to 'Hero,' and was published in 1973, like its precursor in Analog Science Fiction/ Fact. The then editor, the legendary John W. Campbell had rejected as preposterous a story in which women soldiers fought alongside men, but his successor Ben Bova had no such qualms, and the stories very much reflected the growing influence of feminism throughout the decade.
In the second section, the now Sargeant Mandella returns with companion Mary-Gay to Earth after a twenty-seven year absence. Things have not got better while they've been away -- quite the reverse. Mandella must watch his mother die because she doesn't qualify for medical assistance, while Mary-Gay's parent's farm is attacked by raiders and they are murdered. Bodyguards are essential.
The veterans are not qualified for any current job, and the world is so bleak that they re-enlist.
Joe Haldeman
The remaining two sections deal with the rest of the war and at times the tone is so grim that the reader longs for the war to be over. But for Mandella and Mary-Gay, separated and alone as officers with enlisted grunts who hate them, the war will go on forever -- or at least past their death.
The bleak tone, the opposite of the military triumphalism of the revered (but non-serving) Robert Heinlein was one of the reasons why The Forever War was turned down by so many publishers, who felt that an allegory of The Vietnam War was a commercial disaster. Haldeman was wounded in Vietnam and knew the realities of combat. That tone makes the novel's eventual end almost overwhelmingly poignant, and ironically few modern readers even realize the novel's relevance to Vietnam today.
Haldeman won another Hugo in 1977, and further awards in the 1990s, when he returned to some of the themes in The Forever War. Both the prize-winning Forever Peace, and The Forever War's sequel, Forever Free, will be reviewed at a future date.
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