The Forever War (The Forever War, #1) - Joe Haldeman Page 0,3

was, save for a few short weeks in Grenada and Iraq, in ‘91. There’s another generation, behind mine, that did not get to be so lucky. Hundreds of thousands of them went to the Middle East and a good portion of them are still there. Thousands have come back with flags draped over their coffins. Tens of thousands have come back injured, physically or mentally or both, and some portion of them feel the same disassociation to the land they’ve returned to that Mandella and Marygay felt with theirs. Whether one feels the war in Iraq or Afghanistan is right and necessary or not, there’s no doubt a generation will be marked by it and claimed by it.

To my mind, there are two things that make a novel a “classic”—a genuine classic, as opposed to merely “old and continuing to sell.” The first is that it speaks to the time in which the novel first appeared. There is no doubt The Forever War did this; its awards and acclaim are signifiers of that fact. The second thing is tougher, and that is that it keeps speaking to readers outside its time, because what’s in the book touches on something that never goes away, or at the very least keeps coming around.

I also think there’s no doubt The Forever War is doing this, too, right now, in this time—it’s a parable whose lessons need to be learned once more. Like its hero, the book has come through time to be part of something; in this case it’s to be a reminder to all those who are looking to come home again—and those who care about them—that there’s someone who’s been where they are now, and who knows what they feel, and why. Maybe it will help them find their way back. I would have missed the power of that if I had read the novel earlier than this. I’m aware of it now—and glad for it.

All of which is to say: Hey, Joe, I read your book.

Everyone was right about it.

Thank you.

Yours,

John Scalzi

July, 2008

Author’s Note

This is the definitive version of The Forever War. There are two other versions, and my publisher has been kind enough to allow me to clarify things here.

The one you’re holding in your hand is the book as it was originally written. But it has a pretty tortuous history.

It’s ironic, since it later won the Hugo and Nebula Awards, and has won “Best Novel” awards in other countries, but The Forever War was not an easy book to sell back in the early seventies. It was rejected by eighteen publishers before St. Martin’s Press decided to take a chance on it. “Pretty good book,” was the usual reaction, “but nobody wants to read a science fiction novel about Vietnam.” Twenty-five years later, most young readers don’t even see the parallels between The Forever War and the seemingly endless one we were involved in at the time, and that’s okay. It’s about Vietnam because that’s the war the author was in. But it’s mainly about war, about soldiers, and about the reasons we think we need them.

While the book was being looked at by all those publishers, it was also being serialized piecemeal in Analog magazine. The editor, Ben Bova, was a tremendous help, not only in editing, but also for making the thing exist at all! He gave it a prominent place in the magazine, and it was also his endorsement that brought it to the attention of St. Martin’s Press, who took a chance on the hardcover, though they did not publish adult science fiction at that time.

But Ben rejected the middle section, a novella called “You Can Never Go Back.” He liked it as a piece of writing, he said, but thought that it was too downbeat for Analog’s audience. So I wrote him a more positive story and put “You Can Never Go Back” into the drawer; eventually Ted White published it in Amazing magazine, as a coda to The Forever War.

At this late date, I’m not sure why I didn’t reinstate the original middle when the book was accepted. Perhaps I didn’t trust my own taste, or just didn’t want to make life more complicated. But that first book version is essentially the Analog version with “more adult language and situations,” as they say in Hollywood.

The paperback of that version stayed in print for about sixteen years. Then in 1991 I had the opportunity to reinstate my original version. The dates in the