Forever Peace

De: Joe Haldeman

Narrado por: George Wilson

Drawing on his own war experiences, Vietnam veteran Joe Haldeman creates stunning works of science fiction. Forever Peace is not a sequel to his previous award-winning work, The Forever War, but it deals with similarly provocative issues. When it was published, Forever Peace was chosen as the Best Book of the Year by Publishers Weekly. It also won the coveted Hugo Award.

War in the 21st century is fought by "soldierboys". Remote-controlled mechanical monsters, they are run by human soldiers who hard-wire their brains together to form each unit. Julian is one of these dedicated soldiers, until he inadvertently kills a young boy. Now he struggles to understand how this has changed his mind.

Forever Peace is a riveting portrayal of the effects of collective consciousness, and it offers some tantalizing revelations. Narrator George Wilson's skillful performance weaves together the elements of futuristic technology with the drama of a trained soldier reconciling basic human needs.

©1997 Joe Haldeman (P)2000 Recorded Books

Reseñas de la Crítica

• Hugo Award, Best Novel, 1998
• Nebula Award, Best Novel, 1998

"At once a hard science, military, and political thriller, this book presents a thoughtful and hopeful solution to ending war in the 21st century. Essential for sf collections." (Library Journal)

It's an interesting departure from forever war.

This is not a sequel from the forever war. In this book the author Look into what it is to be human.

Great World Building

Fantastic blend of Science Fiction and human experience. I will be listening the next book.

'Walk a mile in their shoes' Syndrome

This book is a spiritual, if not narrative, sequel to Haldeman’s 1975 “Forever War”. Both novels won the Hugo & Nebula, and explore the theme of war’s futility, although from different perspectives and in separate story-worlds. Readers expecting a continuation of Forever War’s interstellar conflict or relativistic time dilation effects, will see that instead this story features a strictly terrestrial struggle between the wealthy nations, fueled by effortless nano-factory produced plenty, and the struggling excluded masses. The earlier novel, written in the immediate post-Vietnam days of an antagonistic welcome for returning veterans, further exaggerated the alienation of the protagonist with a fish-out-of-water situation that placed the character hopelessly out of touch with his own century. Here, in the 1998 novel, one senseless war is supplanted by an invisible one to end all wars, as the protagonist discovers a pacification treatment that involves sharing one of the military’s tightest-held tools with all of humanity to bring individuals together into a community incapable of violence outside of self-defense. Haldeman uses SF technology as vehicle to explore the age-old thought that ‘if we only walked in our enemies shoes for a day’. At the same time, the greatest opponent to this peace movement is one of religious zealots who inexplicably seem to want death and destruction for its own sake. I felt that not enough insight was given to their internal motivation, even when the narrative was told in first person perspective of one these characters. This left them a bit too archetypical and cartoon-evil for me. On the human-scale drama of this story, there is a compelling relationship that is shown conquering the challenges of race, age, military-civilian differences, then ‘jacked’ vs natural minds until it is thoroughly proven to be unshakable. There are also some notable thriller scenes and a number of high-tech asymmetric warfare scenes as well. Absent, sadly, are any aliens or Space Opera tropes or any references to advanced climate change expected over the coming century (CliFi).

Great reading. Poor storytelling.

No complaints with the narration. I actually didn't catch a single mispronounced word. The story itself, however, is just... Lackluster. I've read better world building in high school creative writing classes.

Relationship to the First Book is Confusing

I'm not sure what the relationship with "Forever War," is. Another view of human and cultural evolution? It is an interesting story, but sometimes the point of view of who was narrating was awkward.

Not a sequel!

Don’t go into this thinking it’s a sequel. It most likely takes place in the same universe. Loved the story though. A lot of hard topics, but worth the read.

A good and imaginative story that ends too quickly

I liked this book a lot but for me it seemed to end pretty abruptly. I found myself wondering, with 30 minutes to go, how it could be possible to pull it all together. It does, but abruptly.

Peace means different things to people

Joe Haldeman's Forever Peace is not a temporal follow-on the his earlier Forever War. Rather, this tale takes place entirely on Earth in the mid-20th century. Society has evolved to a strange, but hauntingly familiar caricature of present times. Technology has advanced such that material wants have largely disappeared and people only work if desired. A short military service is mandatory, but is mostly a human operated drone program and the US seems to be at perpetual war with insurgents around the globe. Into this mix, a part time soldier who is also a budding physicist is engaged to stop a large scale experiment going on at Jupiter that has the potential to initiate the end of the universe, but there are other forces intent on bringing this about.

The sci-fi elements are surprisingly prescient in terms of today's developments. Human operated drones, in this case soldier equivalent robots dominate the military. Clearly, all the inherent issues with asymmetric warfare are evident. At the same, there are psych issues that develop with the "jacked in" state resulting from a near hive mind state the soldiers are constantly exposed to. "Nanoforges" have off-loaded human labor requirements for mass production resulting in the vast majority of society with nothing to do. As such, there is 1984 quality without an overbearing government footprint. Finally, Haldeman inserts religious fervor of an "immanentizing the eschaton" aspect to an end of days as well race relations issues that have never quite been addressed.

The narration is quite well done with a good range of voices and excellent character discrimination. Pacing and tone are well suited to the plot.

sub-par for the author.

not bad intellectually. Two much sex!! Skipped half of the book. Would not recommend this.

Perspective, ways of understanding one's world.

I have always preferred hard SF. Speculative, or Science Fiction. By hard S soft I mean solid, or hard science vs a speculative that magic, or miraculous;having mo rational basis as an explanation.

The pivot of this story has no solid science behind it yet all the major points are believable,even rational.
1.Robot like automatons remotely manipulated by people in remote controlling vertual environments.
The danger faced is a rebooting of the cosmoc"Big Bang. " A rebooting replaces our current universe with a new one without a sound explain of how or what would be doing that. Don't let that keep you away from the story, it's well done, and told.
Not the end of the human world, but of everything of the universe.