Your Humble Blogger had been vaguely wanting to reread The Forever War for a while, despite not having particularly liked it on first reading. Certain aspects of it niggled at me, and after ten years (or twenty-five, as I can’t remember when I read the thing first) I couldn’t remember whether what I was remembering was in the book or my own reconstruction. I also knew that a good deal of my grumpiness was due to having read Forever War after a bunch of books that were influenced by it (since even if I did read it twenty-five years ago, that was five years after it came out, and I suspect I read it far more recently than that), so several things that were presented as New Ideas in the book seemed lame and old-hat, despite their having actually been New Ideas in 1975. Some of them, anyway.
Reading the book again was a bit of a disappointment. The stuff that seemed lame and old-hat last time through still seemed lame and old-hat. Can’t step in that river twice, I suppose. Some of the stuff that seemed in my memory to be interesting, particularly the handling of sex and homosexuality, was extremely dopey. I was more offended than last time by the whoo-hoo enforced promiscuity trope. There were, in fact, some good and interesting and well-handled parts, but those were the action sequences that I had totally forgotten about. Oh, and some of the training sequences were impressive, too, although some of them weren’t, and some of them were indistinguishable from Heinlein, which might be a compliment in that context, but then again might not be.
chazak, chazak, v’nitchazek,
-Vardibidian.