The Forever War was published by St. Martin’s Press in 1974, though it had been serialized in Analog beginning in 1972. It won both the Hugo Award (1976) and the Nebula Award (1975), and it remains one of the most powerful anti-war novels in any genre — science fiction’s answer to Catch-22 and Slaughterhouse-Five, written by a man who earned a Purple Heart in Vietnam.
The premise is elegant in its simplicity: William Mandella is drafted into a future war against the Taurans, an alien species. Because the war is fought across interstellar distances, each deployment takes decades or centuries of objective time (though only months for the soldiers, due to relativistic time dilation). Every time Mandella returns from a campaign, Earth has changed — socially, culturally, sexually, economically — and he is increasingly a stranger in his own civilization.
This literalizes the Vietnam veteran’s experience: the soldier returns from war to find that the society he fought for has moved on without him, that its values have changed, that his experience is incomprehensible to civilians, and that there is no “home” to come back to. Haldeman’s genius is making this metaphor concrete through hard science — the physics is real, the dislocation is physical as well as psychological, and the war’s purpose becomes increasingly obscure as centuries pass and the original causes are forgotten.
The novel’s military detail — training, combat, logistics, the psychology of soldiers — is drawn directly from Haldeman’s experience in Vietnam, given a technological coating that makes it science fiction but never obscures the human reality beneath.
Collecting The Forever War
First edition (St. Martin’s Press, New York, 1974): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition in dust jacket: $200–$600
- Signed first edition: $400–$1000
- Without jacket: $40–$80
- UK first (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1975): $80–$200