Forever Free – Joe Haldeman
Sequel to the novel The Forever War, this story picks up with William Mandella after many years of living on a remote outpost with his family and friends. They all live on Middle Finger, a planet set up to purposely not be part of Man in case Man realised that they need to add to their genetic mix. The settlers are becoming restless and are increasingly unsure about the motivation of Man and especially about the motivations of the Taurans. They arrange to take a ship to the farthest reaches of the galaxy and then return – as we know from the first novel, this will take a few months from the settlers point of view but would take several centuries from the point of view of Man. And then the ship starts to fail.
I have to say that I was not as convinced by his tale as I was by the first. The ending seemed overly contrived and, while I can understand the motivations of the settlers, I wasn’t entirely sure why they were rebelling against Man. There was an explanation about worries as to whether Man would want to wipe out the settlers, but since Man is far longer lived (they are clones after all) and the settlers children seemed to want to become Man more and more, there would be absolutely no need to wipe out the settlers. And the ending. The ending. I won’t give it away, but it was awful. It seemed that Haldeman had backed himself into a corner and couldn’t figure out where to go and so he put in the only logical ending – which was terrible. The problem is that first book was less concerned with individual characters as to what going off to war does to people and their view of the world whenever they rejoin it. Subsequently, it’s hard to now the characters well enough to want to follow them on this journey.
Read this story if you want to know what happens next, but don’t feel that you have to. It doesn’t really add much to the first book and you won’t miss much if you don’t read it.
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good article thank you