The Eternal War

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Der Ewige Krieg (English: The Forever War ) is the German title of a military science fiction novel by Joe Haldeman published in 1974 . Haldeman was himself a participant in the Vietnam War and processed his experiences in this work. The first German translation was published by Heyne in 1977 .

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In interstellar war against the alien soldiers Taurians be Kollapsare shipped faster than light in the vicinity of their goals, but make their way to and from the Kollapsaren at a speed close to that of light back. Due to the resulting effect of time dilation , only months pass between the various battles for the soldiers, but years and decades on Earth.

The soldier William Mandella, the protagonist, is drafted under the new conscription laws. Highly intelligent and highly qualified students are explicitly drawn in. The training is incredibly brutal, with two deaths already in the first conventional training phase, which takes place in Illinois. The training unit is then transferred to the moon Charon . The soldiers are equipped with combat suits, which protect them from the effects of the vacuum, but the recruits are inexperienced in using them and this leads to several deaths. During the training almost all recruits have sexual intercourse with all possible partners.

Eventually the soldiers are sent into battle. You land on a planet where units of the taurians, the enemy aliens, are located. The inexperience of the military leadership is evident right from the start: The camouflage patterns that the combat suits can produce are completely useless in the vegetation of the planet. It is also not clear what the enemy tauri actually look like, whereupon the soldiers open fire on a herd of herbivores. This leads to the death of a female soldier who is apparently killed by a parapsychic attack by the animals.

The soldiers continue on their way and finally attack the Taurian settlement. Before this, the commanding officer triggers a deep psychological manipulation of the soldiers, whereby they are flooded with obvious propaganda. Mandella, who is only forced to serve as a soldier, sees through the images that have been smuggled into his consciousness, in which the taurians are portrayed in a grotesque and monster-like manner. Nevertheless, the conditioning works, he and the other soldiers get into a real bloodlust and slaughter the obviously unarmed, completely surprised taurians. Only one alien can escape.

On the way back to earth the ship of the people is attacked, they survive the attack in protective coffins that protect them from the high G-forces while a computer controls the ship. Nevertheless, the taurians manage to severely damage the ship in a way that the soldiers cannot understand.

Nevertheless, the cruiser returns to Earth. Only a few months have passed for the soldiers, but 23 years have passed due to the time dilation on Earth. The soldiers are suddenly rich because of the accrued pay and they all quit work immediately. You will be enlightened about the massive changes that have now taken place on earth. The structure of society changed fundamentally as a result of a great famine: food energy , i.e. calories, is now being used as currency instead of money, and nearly six billion of the nine billion people in the world are unemployed and live on welfare. In addition, homosexuality is massively promoted as the only effective population control; almost a third of the world's population is already homosexual. The war will continue, in no small part because it is clear to everyone that an end to the war would plummet the economy into the abyss. Mandella meets his mother in Washington. The city has changed fundamentally. Everyone is heavily armed; the crime rate is so high that nearly everyone has a bodyguard.

First, Mandella jets around the world with his comrade and lover Marygay; both have become multi-calorie millionaires through the interest on their wages. When his mother dies and Marygays family is killed by bandits in a raid on their farm, the two report back to the military because the world has become a stranger to them.

Once again the military promises more than it delivers: Instead of stationing them together on the moon as promised, they are both sent back into battle with warships. Even the first use turns out to be a disaster. Mandella, promoted to lieutenant, loses a leg when the landing ship is shot down. Marygay is also seriously injured. It was wise to conceal from the soldiers that their squad had to carry out four missions or lose so many people that the chances of success were negligible. The chances of surviving even one mission are negligible.

After the next mission of the combat group fails, the ship returns to the planet Heaven, which serves the soldiers of the people as a place of regeneration and retirement. Since both Mandella and Marygay body parts had to be amputated, both expect their discharge from the military. However, medical research, which is now so far advanced, enables the missing body parts to regrow and thus both remain in military service.

After a year of recovery, the two received new marching orders that put them in different units. Due to the relativistic effects, different amounts of time will pass for both of them after the start of the mission and this makes it almost impossible for them to meet again. Mandella, who was promoted to captain, received extensive training for his task as a unit commander, but increasingly felt like a fossil from bygone days among the new recruits.

At their post on a completely insignificant planet, on which there is not a single human or Tauride structure other than the base built by the soldiers, there was no attack for several months. Mandella is struggling with discipline problems from his people. Eventually, several Taurian ships attack, destroy the human baseship and drop troops. In a bitter struggle, a few people can escape under a stasis field. Mandella uses a trick to kill the enemies and flees with the remains of his troops.

In the Sol system arrived, he told a man that some things have changed over the hundreds of years since his last visit. A collective consciousness has formed on earth, represented only by clones of a woman and a man. This collective consciousness, which only calls itself “Man”, has managed to make peace with the Taurians. As it turned out, the taurians have also been natural clones with a collective consciousness for millions of years, have only defended themselves and had to relearn warfare. Only when they encountered the similar human clones could contact be made, since they are not individuals. At that time the military of the earth faked the destruction of a spaceship to have an excuse for a war, to save the world economy and to unite humanity.

Mandella receives his service file from the clone, with a message on it: his lover Marygay survived and, together with some comrades, bought a spaceship from her savings, converted it into a kind of time shuttle and constantly accelerated it to the speed of light around the star Mizar. Due to the time dilation, hardly any time has passed for them. She asks him to come to the planet called "Middle Finger" in the star system Mizar. It is a garden planet that is inhabited by war veterans and serves as a eugenic testing ground for heterosexuals. There she is waiting for him on the time shuttle. Still, hundreds of years after the peace was made, soldiers are returning and settling on this planet. He sets off immediately. Marygay finally waited 261 years for Mandella.

By the end of the book, Mandella had been at war for about 881 real years, if less than a decade of subjective years. The epilogue tells that they are both married and had a healthy boy in a veteran church on the planet.

Awards

The novel won the Hugo Award , the Nebula Award and the Locus Award .

Others

  • Together with the illustrator Marvano , Haldeman published a comic version in 1988, which was initially published in Dutch ( De Eeuwige Oorlog ) and French ( La Guerre Eternelle ) before being translated into English ( The Forever War ) and German in 1991 .
  • The term time debt , also used in this novel, is often used in science fiction to describe time dilation .
  • In the original novel, the plot begins in 1997 and continues into the distant future, but in the current (German) edition from 2004 the start of the plot was moved to the year 2297, as the old timeline no longer seemed realistic to the publisher.
  • The descriptions of group sex and blatant marijuana use in the novel led to strong criticism of the book, especially in the USA.
  • Eternal peace (ger .: Forever Peace ) Haldeman in 1997 is not a sequel but a variation on the same theme: the story of a man who is cruel, seemingly unstoppable war machine against his will part. Only the novel At the end of the war (English: Forever Free ) from 1999 continues the plot from the first part.
  • In 2013 a new edition of the novel was published in a completely new translation by Mantikore-Verlag . The novel also includes the sequels Eternal Peace and At the End of War .

Publications

Novel form

All novels were written by Joe Haldemann.

Comic

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Science Fiction Media in Transition. In: web.mit.edu. Retrieved September 5, 2015 .
  2. ↑ The Forever War . ( worldswithoutend.com [accessed September 5, 2015]).
  3. ↑ Future War Stories: FWS Forgotten Classics: The Forever War Graphic Novels (Vol 1-3). In: futurewarstories.blogspot.de. Retrieved September 5, 2015 .
  4. ↑ Peter Schlobinski, Oliver Siebold: Dictionary of Science Fiction . Peter Lang, 2008, ISBN 978-3-631-57980-0 ( google.com [accessed September 5, 2015]).
  5. ↑ Joe Haldeman: The Eternal War. (No longer available online.) Archived from the original on March 4, 2016 ; Retrieved September 5, 2015 . Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / mayersche-blog.de