At the end of the war

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At the end of the war (English: Forever Free ) is the German title of a 1999 published science fiction novel by Joe Haldeman . It is the continuation of The Eternal War from 1974. In this work, too, Haldeman, himself a participant in the Vietnam War , processes his experiences.

action

After the eponymous conflict in The Eternal War has ended and almost all of humanity, with the exception of ancient, returning veterans like Mandella, has united in the entity “human” ( clones with a collective consciousness), William Mandella and his consort Marygay travel to the city the fifth planet of the star system Mizar, which is to serve as a refuge for them and the other veterans.

They call this planet, on which there is a harsh winter, the name “Middle Finger” (English: Middle Finger or Motherfucker, MF for short). The planet, however, is actually little more than a reserve that “man” laid out as a eugenic test site as a reassurance in the event that his spiritualization should turn out to be a mistake. Humiliated by this life and permanently watched by "humans", the veterans decide to break out of their golden cage.

Mandella would like to use an old spaceship and travel 40,000 years into the future through time dilation , in the hope that “man” no longer rules there. While her daughter accompanies Mandella and Marygay, her son decides to stay and become part of the "man".

After the start of the spaceship, there are inexplicable malfunctions, the veterans have to break off their journey and return to middle finger after 24 years. Here they find MF completely depopulated and travel on to earth. After they discover that all humans and the extraterrestrial taurians have disappeared, a shapeshifter (which is very similar to the later chameleon from Haldemans Camouflage ) is revealed to them .

The storylines are surprisingly cut by a powerful divine experimenter who reveals to Mandella that he disliked his escape from his intended habitat (the galaxy) and that he will now withdraw from the experiment - thus the universe known to Mandella presents itself as a simulated one Reality . The experimenter then reverses the depopulation and causes a five percent change in the speed of light. Mandella and the people then measured all natural constants again in the epilogue and questioned the laws of nature, since the divine experimenter could also change variables that were believed to be fixed.

Others

  • At the end of The Eternal War , Middle Finger was described as a garden planet rather than an ice world.
  • In 2013 a new edition of the novel The Eternal War was published in a completely new translation by Mantikore-Verlag, which also includes At the end of the war .

Publications

Novel form