Peace and War

Ambitious title for a post, this one, looks like I'm taking the piss off Tolstoy. No, I've not read War and Peace, and I don't want to start a topic on the current wars all around the world. That might be a plan for the future, but it takes a bit more research work and would probably end up very similar to the Amnesty International web site. I'll leave that for another day.

Peace and War is the title of a collection of novels, written by Joe Haldeman. The oldest one, dating 1974, The Forever War, is what I've been reading recently (I'm halfway through the second volume, Forever Free, now). Ok, it's sci-fi, so there are aliens that look like hourglasses and fancy stuff like collapsar to bring you from one side of the galaxy to the other, just to add some spice to the whole. But the basis of the book is slightly more solid: this war is fought by elite soldiers, drafted from universities, regular boys and girls (yes, the balance of sexes is about 50%, combat and support troops, so the book was quite advanced for its time in that area - and there is plenty of female soldiers dying in action, real parity. If you have watched Starship troopers, you have a clue of what I'm speaking about) drafted into the army and turned into highly technological and expensive cannon fodder. That in itself makes my stomach sick, the simple idea of such a waste of lives. The fact that it has been, and often still is, regular procedure on most of this planet, the real one I mean, just adds to the melee.

Smartly enough, the author throws in another angle: jumping around the galaxy involves relativistic effects. Space ships blazing around at .6, .7 c means that a mission that takes one subjective year amounts to 20, 50, 200 years back home. The whole war spans a millennium, soldiers come back home to find a society with which they are completely unfamiliar, their parents all of a sudden old folks or dead altogether. They feel uprooted and dislocated, and they are easily tricked into rejoining the army, to be thrown again into the meat grinder. Average probability of getting back alive from a mission: 8%. Average probability of getting through the whole war alive: well you do the math, only one soldier starts with the first mission and comes back from the last. The veterans of this millennium long war are a couple of hundreds troops.

How does a war last a millennium? By modifying the society into a war oriented economy. You can bet Haldeman has read his share of George Orwell, there is no Party in the book and no clear political angle, but he depicts hazily an economy based on war, that would shatter to bits if the war were ever to end. Remember that that was 1974, not last year, but the basics seem to have stayed the same.

Conclusion, this book has been a great reading, highly recommended if you can digest sci-fi to get to the good bits. I personally love science fiction, so I might be a little biased in judgment. Well, pity, you'll have to deal with it or simply buy another book :)
I.