FOREVER FREE is the third novel in Haldeman's classic Forever War series.

The novel follows William Mandella, who is one of the few remaining humans who fought and survived the Forever War. Mandella and his other throwbacks have returned to find humanity has evolved into a group mind, "Man". Disturbed by this development, he takes the opportunity to retain his self for the price of exile to a frozen world called "Middle Finger" (which is a bit on the nose, but ok). After settling down for a life with his partner, Mandella learns that something else is behind the offer for exile...

The novel is a well-written, thought-provoking science fiction novel. It's not as good as THE FOREVER WAR, which many consider to be one of the all-time classic SF novels. I'd say this one is for completists - it's not essential to read, but it is quite interesting.

While Forever Free is a direct sequel to Joe Haldeman's Forever War, it turns out that Forever Peace is a much better successor. Both Forever War and Forever Free ruminate on the role of the soldier both in war and society. Forever War has the added frisson of being written not long after Haldeman's military service in Vietnam; there's a feeling of realness in the depictions of both soldierly kvteching and social alienation. Forever Free picks up with Forever War's protagonist, William Mandella, after he and Marygay have retired to a planet called MF -- which either stands for Middle Finger or Mother Fucker. Either way, it's not a hospitable place, and the Mandellas and their fellow veterans -- who are the main population on the planet -- decide they're going to bug out for a couple thousand years. The government -- for lack of a better world -- is made up of identical clones who more or less keep the population of MF around as genetic backup. They do not approve of the plan; the soldiers yeet off anyway; they end up returning in only 24 years not thousands.

At this point the novel takes a sharp left turn into a murder mystery of sorts. Though the conclusion of the mystery is confusing and trite, the plotting up to that point was fine, workmanlike sff. This section reminded me of post-Dune Frank Herbert books, which I gulped down at an impressionable age. This is both good and bad: I find this kind of sff comforting and familiar, but, like Herbert, Haldeman has a tin ear for dialogue and a flat emotional range, and the Big Ideas are neither as big nor as clever as they are presented.

The time dilation in Forever War worked as an excellent metaphor for the disorientation a soldier feels upon returning home after war. In Forever Free, Mandella's status as an aging serviceman resettled into civilian life isn't really pertinent, and the science fiction isn't in service anything specifically about his experience. And if that is so, then why have this be a sequel at all? He could have been literally anyone else and the novel would carry on undamaged. I hate to say this out loud, because I really respect Haldeman's body of work, but this feels like a rushed cash-in. Alas.

Although I had read Haldeman's <em>The Forever War</em> when it was first published in the 1970's, I had not read any of the sequels to the book.

<em>Forever Free</em> followers our 'forever soldier,' William Mandella, who is a man without a country ... without a world. As he fought in the intergalactic wars, thousands of years passed on Earth and he no longer recognizes what it was he was fighting for. Mankind has now become a 'hive mind' simply called 'Man" and Mandella and a few of his fellow soldiers now feel even more lost than ever and so they go in to a self-imposed exile, hoping to settle on a planet known as Middle Finger. The colonists struggle to survive despite carefully hand-picking the members who would join them for what they could bring to the group. But a surprise awaits Mandella and his fellow exiles.

I am glad I waited to read this as my disappointment is lessened because my expectations were low. The book has been around for a while but I haven't seen many lists proclaiming it a 'must-read' and so I expected it to fall short. And it does.

Haldeman does a nice job of building the story and bringing us back into the life of William Mandella and a great deal of time was spent following he and his wife and close associates making plans and embarking on a new life.

And then Haldeman cops out.

Perhaps, when this was written, Haldeman's ending came as a surprise and was quite original, but the deus ex machina sensibility here rings hollow today. The ending comes completely out of nowhere as if the author had nothing more in mind for the telling of Mandella's story and decided to just end it.

The first book, and even the first part of this book, had such strong parallels to the Vietnam vet coming home to a country they didn't recognize that it proved to be a wonderful sci-fi social commentary, but then the sci-fi part took over and erased what had worked so nicely.

I graciously give this two stars because Haldeman starts out on a nice path, but let's go of it at the end.

I cannot recommend this book.

Looking for a good book? Read Joe Haldeman's <em>The Forever War</em>, but go no further and do not read <em>Forever Free</em>.

I received a digital copy of this book from the publisher, through Netgalley, in exchange for an honest review.

First published in 1999; published digitally by Open Road Media on September 27, 2016

Forever Free, unlike Forever Peace, is a direct sequel to The Forever War. It isn’t as poignant as The Forever War, but few books are. While it has a smattering of powerful moments, it is nothing like its predecessor.

After the Forever War ended, veterans and others went to Middle Finger where they were allowed to live as insurance against the possible failure of cloned perfection, an experiment called Man that has produced billions of humans, all communing with a group mind. William Mandella, a natural human who starred in The Forever War, is now 1,168 in Earth years, but still in his 30s physically thanks to relativity and all the interstellar traveling he did as a soldier.

Mandella and his wife Marygay think of themselves as prisoners, preserved as part of a natural genepool but given no authority on an arctic planet that is effectively ruled by Man. They decide their best option is to gather a bunch of humans and take a five-year trip to the stars, then turn around and (thanks to relativity) return 40,000 years later. They are surprised to learn that Man is only too happy to get rid of them. The trip will keep the genepool intact while assuring that the troublesome humans don’t bother them for 40,000 years.

Before the trip can begin, Charlie receives an ominous warning from an unidentified Tauran (the alien enemy humans fought in the Forever War). From that point on, strange things happen, disappearances of matter (and then people) that seem to defy the laws of physics. Not all of the events strike me as being logically consistent, but logic turns out to have little to do with the story.

Forever Free isn’t military science fiction. It isn’t space opera. It’s sort of a first contact story, but not really. For a while, it is sort of a survivalist story, although it isn’t the kind of modern survivalist story in which paranoid whackos lovingly describe their guns and bugout bags while eagerly waiting to shoot their neighbors after a mass disaster. This could have been a decent story about survivors working cooperatively to rebuild a society (cooperation being a concept that never occurs to the whackos who sleep next to their bugout bags), but that plot thread, like all the other interesting subplots in the novel, dies out before it develops.

At its heart, Forever Peace is a science fiction mystery, the mystery being, what’s going on with all the disappearances? The answer to the mystery … well, I was disappointed. Readers of a different philosophical persuasion might find it satisfying but, judging from Amazon reviews, readers who are hostile to religious belief systems consider Forever Peace one of the worst sf books ever written. That’s consistent with many Amazon reviews I’ve read by sf readers who are viciously intolerant of any belief system to which they do not adhere. Intolerance, to me, seems antithetical to the idea of science fiction, which should teach readers to be open minded. I have no religious beliefs and therefore do not share the belief system that drives the novel’s ending, but the book isn’t as bad as many one-star Amazon reviews make it out to be. Other sf authors, however, have covered the same territory more creatively, including Philip K. Dick and Arthur C. Clarke and even Isaac Asimov.

In the end, Forever Peace tosses out too many ideas and tries to be too many things, preventing it from developing any one theme successfully. The ending is a little too easy, almost lazy in its execution. Other aspects of the story are interesting, but it doesn’t work well enough as a whole to merit my recommendation, making this the only Joe Haldeman novel I can’t recommend.

NOT RECOMMENDED