Cyteen
Hugo winner (1989) and a regular pick for the best SF novel about cloning ever written; its psychogenesis arguments anticipate decades of behavioural-genetics debate.
Book Entry · Science Fiction
What is Forever Peace about?
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.
Why it matters
Hugo, Nebula and Campbell Memorial winner — one of the rare books to take all three; its remote-warfare and forced-empathy arguments only grow more current.
Read next
Ender's Game
Hugo and Nebula winner, one of the bestselling SF novels ever, on official reading lists from secondary schools to the US Marine Corps; filmed in 2013.
Exhalation
Multiple Hugo and Locus wins among its contents; the title story in particular — entropy as first-person elegy — is already standard anthology canon.