{"id":10288,"date":"2006-09-25T13:21:54","date_gmt":"2006-09-25T17:21:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/vardibidian\/2006\/09\/25\/10288.html"},"modified":"2018-03-12T16:55:17","modified_gmt":"2018-03-12T21:55:17","slug":"book-report-the-forever-war","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/2006\/09\/25\/book-report-the-forever-war\/","title":{"rendered":"Book Report: The Forever War"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>Your Humble Blogger had been vaguely wanting to reread <a href=\"http:\/\/www.harpercollins.com\/books\/9780060510862\/The_Forever_War\/index.aspx\">The Forever War<\/a> 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&#8217;t remember when I read the thing first) I couldn&#8217;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 <I>Forever War<\/I> 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.\n<p>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&#8217;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&#8217;t, and some of them were indistinguishable from Heinlein, which might be a compliment in that context, but then again might not be.\n<p><I>chazak, chazak, v&#8217;nitchazek<\/I>,<br>-Vardibidian.\n<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>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\u2019t&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[194],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10288","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-report"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10288","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10288"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10288\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17819,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10288\/revisions\/17819"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10288"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10288"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10288"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}