Author Profile · Science Fiction
Joe Haldeman
b. 1943 · American
Who is Joe Haldeman?
Drafted out of an astronomy degree and severely wounded in Vietnam, Haldeman came home with a Purple Heart and the raw material for the definitive military SF novel. The Forever War turned relativistic time dilation into the great metaphor for the veteran's experience — soldiers returning, again and again, to a home that has moved on without them — and won everything in sight despite a string of editors telling him nobody wanted Vietnam books. He has spent the decades since proving he was no one-war writer: Forever Peace, The Hemingway Hoax and a long professorship at MIT teaching writing to engineers. SFWA Grand Master, 2010.
Why they matter
The essential counterweight to Starship Troopers and the writer who made military SF a literature of consequence rather than recruitment. Every grunt's-eye view of interstellar war since stands on The Forever War.
Essential books — and where to start
The Forever War
1974 · Science Fiction · Military SF, Hard SF
Conscripted under the Elite Conscription Act for his physics degree and fitness scores, William Mandella fights the Taurans across collapsar jumps that flick decades past at relativistic speed: each tour returns him to an Earth more alien than the enemy — new economics, new sexualities, new languages — until only the army, and fellow soldier Marygay Potter, remain as home. The combat is exact (Haldeman's wounds informing every page), the time-dilation grief exacter still, and the war's final accounting — a thousand years of casualties traced to a misunderstanding — lands like a court verdict.
Forever Peace
1997 · Science Fiction · Military SF, Social SF, Hard SF
Not a sequel but a thematic rhyme, set in 2043: the rich world fights its proxy wars through soldierboys — remote-operated combat mechs whose operators, like physicist-draftee Julian Class, are jacked together into ten-person mind-shares that make atrocity a group memory. The discovery that prolonged jacking renders soldiers incapable of killing collides with a doomsday project and a millenarian cult eager to use it, leaving Julian's circle a single ruthless question: pacify the entire species by force, or let it end? Haldeman's drone-war ethics arrived a quarter-century before the news.
1907–1988 · American
The first SF writer to crack the big general-fiction magazines and bestseller lists, and the genre's most influential craftsman.
1920–1992 · American (Russian-born)
One of the Big Three of Golden Age SF.
b. 1949 · American
Among the most awarded novelists in the field's history and the writer who proved space opera could be character-driven comedy of manners without losing its nerve.
