Forever Free (The Forever War Series Book 2)

This is the direct sequel to the "Forever War". The book picks up about twenty years after the end of the forever war. The soldiers are now chafing at the bit from the treatment at the hands of the clones from Earth. They are tired of being kept on their planet of middle finger as insurance against genetic failure of the perfect clones. A group led by the hero of the first book, Mandella, steal a space ship and travel into the far galaxy to find their fortune. What happens is unexpected and the group returns to Earth to find the truth.

This takes a different turn from the "Forever War" in its scope. This book questions religion and not the meaning of war. The ending is a bit contrived for me, but the book was enjoyable non the less. A nice bit of lite reading. If you are a bit strict in your interpretation of religion, be warned you might not find the subject matter that easy. Recommended

In this book, Haldeman returns to the characters he introduced in Forever War about 18 years later in their lives. Now living in a cold world, they go about their lives with little enthusiasm while the civilization of Man runs everything that matters. Bored and unable to accept their role, they decide to take a relativistic cruise through space just to return home thousands of years later and see if they like it better then. The book starts fine with a steady rhythm and pace and an engaging premise. It all kind of falls apart half-way through the characters' journey. Why? Well I would spoil the book if I told you. Let's just say that the author resorts to the fantastic and we end up with a kind of Deus Ex Machina ending that satisfies no one. Ultimately the endeavor doesn't amount to anything. What can I say? If you change the rules half-way through the book without really explaining how, it's very unfulfilling. As I said, a bit disappointing in terms of plot. As Haldeman is an accomplished and good author you don't actually dislike it, but this isn't one to remember.

Up until this point, I've liked every Haldeman story I've ever read. I don't like to give negative reviews as a rule, but this one is such a disappointment I think it would be a service to warn anyone else who likes Haldeman's normally first-rate writing. The first half of this book is an involving and well-told story, but then ideas just sort of come at you from out of left field, and the book takes off in weird and unsatisfying directions. It's as if there are pieces of three unrelated stories squeezed awkwardly into one book, and none of them are developed completely. This is not a sequel to the classic Forever War, except in so far as it (quite unnecessarily) includes some of the same characters. But even worse, Forever Free's reinterpretation of reality undermines the meaning of Forever War's powerful statements on humanity and war. Not only is this book bad in itself, it will taint your affection for its splendid predecessor. If you like Haldeman and love the classic Forever War, do yourself a favor and skip this one.

In "The Forever War," William Mandella tells the story of a 1960's flower child that grew up to find himself a soldier in an interstellar war waged by Earth against the mysterious Taurans. Because of the time-dilation effects of collapsar travel at near-light speed, Mandella returns repeatedly to an Earth that becomes stranger with each visit. His Earthbound friends and family grow old and die, and as the war stretches into a thousand years, it's his own fellow humans that become the aliens. Mandella's fellow veterans are a confusing mix of soldiers from many centuries -- some of them speaking in a language he can hardly understand. Mandella, with his roots in the 20th century, is one of the oldest of them all. At the time "Forever War" was published in 1974, the book's flat combat-laden narrative echoed Heinlen's "Starship Troopers" and reflected the alienation Haldeman must have felt when he returned from his own Vietnam experiences. This brilliant book won a Nebula award, and over the years I have read it many times, trying to understand how Haldeman's writing so effortlessly captured a purity of character and action. The book was followed by a Nebula award-winning sequel -- "Forever Peace." Twenty-five years after publishing "The Forever War," Haldeman has finally concluded the trilogy with the fascinating "Forever Free." Mandella is now in his 50's, retired with his wife and two nearly-grown children on a remote planet settlement where he and his fellow veterans from the 1000-year war can live out their remaining years. Both Taurans and "Man" have been united into a "Group Mind" where individuals exchange memories every day, and human individuality has become an anachronism. Mandella and his fellow veterans are being preserved as a kind of experiment by the group mind -- an experiment that backfires when Mandella and his wife Marygay organize their fellow veterans and abduct an ancient collapsar starship with the plan of escaping by jumping another 40,000 years into the future. The last half of the book takes a rather bizarre turn toward the metaphysical, but the action never stumbles, and it was 4:30 AM before I read the last page. Haldeman's vivid and thoughtful handing of his characters, emotion, and science concepts shows science fiction at its very best and puts him near the top rank of living science fiction writers. My recommendation -- don't read this book. Read the whole trilogy from scratch -- and don't miss another frequently overlooked Haldeman favorite of mine -- "Mind Bridge."

--Auralgo

_Forever Free_ begins promisingly: The veterans who survived the _Forever War_ find themselves unable to fit into a peaceful, but thoroughly alien culture. They try to escape their situation by skipping history for a few thousand years.
So far so good, and maybe it's a good idea that the author doesn't let them succeed in this project - I don't blame him for having no clear idea what sort of society the time travelers would find on their return, and even a well executed novel along these lines would appear to be overly derivative of _The Forever War_.
The alternative that Haldeman offers, however - literally a "deus ex machina" - was pretty unsatisfactory and ultimately left me disappointed in the book.

Other reviewers have recapped the plot, so I'll focus on how this book failed to satisfy. It's not the writing - I felt more engaged with the characters this time around than in the Forever War. Mandela and Marygay have aged realistically, and their lives seem well sketched out. Their children are engaging characters, and the "supporting cast" is well realized, as is the overall concept of escaping the groupthink socity of "Man" by using relativistic travel into the future.

Everything, and I mean everything, leading up to the first few days after they begin their journey works so well that I thought I'd be giving this a higher review than Forever War (which I thought was a bit overrated). Then, it just falls apart. If Haldeman had intended to write this novel's current ending all the way along, he did NOTHING to prepare the reader for it.

As other have noted, you get two Deus ex Machina's - one literally the Machina, the other the Deus. It's all too pat. It's interesting reading, but if I had bought the book rather than getting it from a Library, I'd be flinging the book into the garbage about now.

The best way to describe the effect of the last 3 chapters of this novel is kind of like going to see Harry Met Sally, and then to have Sally turn out to be the Species alien in the last 2 minutes. Or to watch the Searchers, and end it with John Wayne singing "Oh what a Beautiful Morning...."

An author makes a deal with the reader - I think Haldeman reneged on this deal, and its too bad, because I would have loved to have seen an end to the original premise of the book.

Some SF and fantasy authors, having penned a classic or having set a popular series in motion, can't seem to resist the economic allure of returning and graverobbing a bit. The usual results are severe mediocrity trending towards active badness--see for example Robert Silverberg's utterly ho-hum, ponderously inflated sequels to his Valentine books, or Anne McCaffrey's continuing misadventures in tedium on the world of Pern.
Haldeman's Forever Free is another matter entirely. It's one of the strangest, most complete misfires I've ever read. I knew it wasn't well-regarded by SF readers (as opposed to press reviewers who gave it a thumbs-up based on Haldeman's reputation alone, it seems), but I didn't realize just how bad it actually was until I finally got around to reading it.
About the first 2/3 of the book is a slow-paced but modestly adequate exploration of William Mandella's life on Middle Finger and the restlessness that leads him and some of the other veterans to want to escape being a genetic reserve for the clones who ended the Forever War. There's an interesting emotional conflict regarding Mandella's children, in particular.
And then the bottom drops out. The last third is so staggeringly bad, that it reads roughly like a 10-year old SF fan was asked by Haldeman to complete the manuscript. In very short order, we get a new alien race introduced with stunning casualness and lack of imagination only to have them be a red herring for the introduction of God, or something closely approximating Him. It's weird, it's dumb, and leaves you with a sense of disgust that goes far beyond the ordinary "Wow, that was a waste of my time" feeling that usually accompanies a bad book. Something very strange happened to Haldeman when he was working on this, that's for sure.

Wow, this one was a real disappointment. After having read, and greatly enjoyed, 'Forever War' and 'Forever Peace', I was anxious to read this book. 'Forever Free', however, failed to live up to expectations. It lacked any of the impact of the previous two books and failed to generate any thought provoking questions. The book started off slowly, but there was a sense that something really interesting was going to happen. At about the point that the interesting stuff should have happened, the story simply sputtered out to a really disappointing conclusion. Suffice it to say the end was incredibly simplistic and really didn't seem to relate to the rest of the story. It seems as though Haldeman either grew bored with the story and decided to wrap it up in a simple, "Star Trek"-esque mysterious omniscient aliens manner or he decided that he really wanted to write a different story. Either way, this was a real disappointment.

For all the comparisons with Hitchhikers by the other reviewers, you'd think this book to be a comedy. It is not.
What it is is an excellent novel of expansive future fiction.
What it is not is a true sequel in tone, voice or narrative to Forever War. To complain that it is not a true sequel is correct. To complain that it is not a good book is wrong. To compare it to Forever War is to invite confusion.
Very few books can compare to Forever War. But to read this book is to invite pleasure and to think about its concepts is to enjoy the things that I like best in science fiction.

It is great to see familiar characters from a truly engaging story. Having Marygay and William back, twenty years later "subjective time," well, there's a lot that can be done with that.
And Haldeman really appears to enjoy doing it, telling the story of how arriving into this bizarre descendant-of-man culture has affected these people.
But then, suddenly, 90% of the way through the book, it seems Haldeman lost his interest and just decided, okay, it's time to end this story and wham! Out of nowhere comes a hard and fast deus ex machina ending. Seriously deus ex machina. Like, the epitome of deus ex machina.
It was so disappointing. However, the ride getting there was so much fun. If you just don't bother to read the resolution it would be a 5.

This is not a worthy successor to The Forever War. While Haldeman's style is in top form, his ideas are not. Even the favorable reviews concede that Forever Free has none of the impact of the original Forever War. What we have here is a forced novel springing from a half-formed idea that would have been better as a mediocre Twilight Zone episode.
Over the past few year I've been reading most of Haldeman's works. While not all of them are treasures, almost all of them are worth reading. Usually even his worst books have something unique to offer that you can't find anywhere else. Unfortunately his newer work is not up to par, and this novel is not even worth a read.
I would highly suggest Forever Peace. While not a true sequel in the sense of plot or setting, it is really the logical successor to The Forever War in terms of ideas.

This book is astonishingly bad. The initial part of the book is slow paced, filled with irrelevant and distracting detail. It is conceivable that such detail would have been useful in a book with an actual plot, but all turns out to be pure filler. Normally one expects the back cover blurb to give a precis of the context for the book and may be a bit of the initial action. In this case it covers about 2/3 of the entire novel. To end it, Haldeman pulls out not just one but _two_ Deus Ex Machinas. Multiple potentially interesting plot lines are just blown off. Prior civilizations, planetary anomalies, the fate of the people left on the crippled starship, interspecies justice and a murder mystery, all brought up and forgotten. In the latter, one of the human crew members is killed by a Tauran. The resolution? "Well, nobody liked the guy anyway so we'll just move on". That's not a spoiler because it doesn't relate to the plot at all - it has no relationship with anything that goes on before or after. The novel is filled with exactly this kind of random, disconnected event. I just wish that I could forget the contents as fast as the author apparently did.

I read "Forever War" 20-odd years ago and thought it was a complete masterpiece. I have also read many of JH's other titles and enjoyed them all. So, when "Forever Free" came out I read the other reviews and thought "It can't be as bad as the reviews make out". Boy, was I wrong!
The story starts out with the heroes from the last book living stale lives on a frozen planet, trying to eke out a living. They are constatly harrassed by Man, who are now a group mind like the Taurans (the previous book's bad guys). So they decide to steal a starship and use relativity to their "advantage" and skip 40,000 years by flying off very fast for 10 years or so. Something goes wrong and they are forced to abandon the trip and come back after twenty-odd years.
I won't spoil the story (it manages that all by itself) but what they find and the explanation for it is absolutely dire! If I came back to earth after being absent for so long, the LAST place I would go would be Disneyworld!!!!! Where the Omnis came from and what their purpose is is a complete mystery. The intervention of God is completely ludicrous. It seems that JH was on a tight schedule and couldn't be bothered to think up a decent ending for the book and so came up with something that would make a 10 year old's descriptive essay look good!
If you are looking for something wacky, then read The Hitch Hikers Guide to the Galaxy, at least Douglas Adams makes the story interesting and amusing. He actually answers life, the universe and everything (the answer is 42 by the way). This is utter drivel.
William Mandella has been a fictional hero of mine for 20 years - come on Joe, he didn't deserve this!!!!
Sorely disappointed........

Amazingly, I believe this book surpasses the quality of "The Forever War."

The book is paced at a break-neck speed with very few exceptions. The story picks up where the Forever War left off. We learn that the characters are placed on a frozen world where they are preserved as breeding stock. Haldemen quickly explores the societal problems of living in a world designed as a human zoo. The characters, (war vets with a genetic proclivity for "finding a new frontier") develop a plan for rebellion against their "alien" captors. This plan proceeds as one would expect in any adventure novel, with lots of action and inspired character development.

At this point in the story, (at the exact moment when you think you can predict the story's outcome) Haldeman's imagination begins to take over. In a series of awe inspiring plot twists (inspiring for both their creativity and their expert placement in the story), he transforms the theme from that of a simple adventure in space into a profound message about humanity's role in the universe.

This book was captivating (I read it in less than 6 hours), well written, and most of all, thought provoking. It also relies less heavily science than his previous work, although a rudimentary knowledge of time dialation is required.

Masterfully done, I wouldn't be surprised if Haldemen has a Hugo\Nebula award headed his way.

What a disappointment! I loved "The Forever War" and eagerly awaited the sequel when I found out it was forthcoming. What I found the most disappointing wasn't that it couldn't match the power of the first book but that, overall, it was poorly written. Haldeman maintained his characters well but the actual story did not develop. We start out with a potentially insidious (to our eyes)evolution of future humans and Taurans melding into an entirely new being. That start was extremely intriguing. Then, all of a sudden, the last remnants of our form of humanity are hurtling across the galaxy in a semi-comedic god hunt. The two halves of the story did not gel! One or the other might have been good. It leaves one feeling that he (Haldeman)realized that he bit off more than he could chew or focus upon. Don't waste the effort.

Reasonable setup, can't say that for the rest, though.

The few human relics of the war are living together stashed away on a planet just in case the group entity needs them again.

Bunch of retired soldiers, so they get bored, and decide to play with relativity and take a trip into the future, so to speak.

When they come back after your spaceship accident type event, everybody has gone bye-bye, humans and aliens.

The story starts to go that way, too, unfortunately.

Awful. Just awful. Haldeman is capable of writing an excellent novel, as evidenced by "The Forever War" which is far and away my favorite SF-War novel. This book has nothing to say, but nevertheless manages to say it in an almost incoherent (and completely unentertaining) way. Save your time and money, and look elsewhere.

The "forever" series seems to be forever declining with each sequel. The thrilling "Forever War" degenerated into the so-so "Forever Peace" and then now, the horrible "Forever Free." Let us hope to be forever free of this series.
The book suffers from weak storytelling and a sense of disappointment when what seems to be the focus of the story - the starship excursion - falls out of the picture.
The ending is classic deus-ex-machina. Using it is the kiss of death. Nothing in the plot prepared us for the ridiculous ending.

Nothing could top haldeman's first book but this comes close for me. Many say that the slow pace and rather random plot majorly detract from the book. However I thoroughly enjoyed this novel for that very reason. It's an inventive way to answer the story's question; What will they find 40,000 years in the future? I was expecting something strange but this end twist was wholly unexpected. Willaim's life on middle finger and his relationship with his family is also quite good. We are left thinking happily ever after when really William's new life isn't so wonderfully amazing.
AMybee it's just me but this is one of my favorite reads.

...would you offer it tea? Probably not (or at least not until yourheart had remembered to start beating again). But if you were acharacter in this book, you just might.
The above is an exaggeration, but the exemplifies what I find most wrong with this book. Characters tend to "coast" through the rough (intellectual/emotional) spots, or else their reactions are cut short with a quick fade. This tendency approaches silliness by the end of the book....
It might be worth a read but the two previous "Forever" books are much better. END

Haldeman's Forever War and Forever Peace solidified my taste for his writing style, so I was looking forward to Forever Free. While plot has never been his greatest strength, the first two novels managed to string together a series of well described scenes into an overall context. In Forever Free the scenes are there, but the connection is either confused or at times so strained as to be ridiculous. If you love his writing and characters, there is still some of that here, just don't go looking for clean story-line.

By this point, any opinion I write will probably sound like one of dozens written before. Still, I have to say I didn't like this book. I actually didn't think it was too bad until the end, at which point my suspension of disbelief goes out the window. One of my personal prejudices is that a bad ending can make me dislike an entire book, and that is the case here.

This book is (I think) a worthy sequel to Forever War. Although the story gets a little tedious in the middle, it explodes towards the end. And the author's writing is as compact and refreshing as ever. If you are familiar with later works of Mark Twain, you will see the similarities in the plot from the _Mysterious Stranger_, one of Twain's last novellas.

no guns sf. Interesting about limits of who we are. Only critisms is that three books have forever in there title. Hovever Haldemans concepts are readable and provoking. Read 'war' first before starting on this

This book is (I think) a worthy sequel to Forever War. Although the story gets a little tedious in the middle, it explodes towards the end. And the author's writing is as compact and refreshing as ever. If you are familiar with later works of Mark Twain, you will see the similarities in the plot from the _Mysterious Stranger_, one of Twain's last novellas.

I am at a loss after reading Forever Free. Forever War introduced the concept of the veteran and what they agreed to, and then ultimately the plot wound down to a good military sci fi. You would think you are getting this with Forever Free, but this couldn't be further from what you actually get.

The story is a slow moving plot, one that re-introduces the veterans of the Forever War, this time as they are living in "freedom" on a habitable planet. The rewards for volunteering. Not entirely happy, they begin to think of life off of the planet. This in and of itself is a good lead up to a confrontation that, judging from the previous book, would be exciting and action packed. This is not the case. The plot fizzles out, or better yet stayed on its slow meandering path, never actually going anywhere.

There are some ah-ha moments where Haldeman tries to surprise you, but by then you don't really care anymore. The plot doesn't take an interesting turn, one where your interest is caught, until about the last 30 pages or so. Even that is nothing more than a paranormal/religious what-if situation that Haldeman explores before snapping his fingers and returning everything to normal. I can't say that I recommend this book. It is a quick, fluid read, so if you have a night free and nothing else to read give it a go.

2.5 stars

no guns sf. Interesting about limits of who we are. Only critisms is that three books have forever in there title. Hovever Haldemans concepts are readable and provoking. Read 'war' first before starting on this

Many others are disappointed by the ending. The expectation in a science fiction book is that you will see a concept introduced and expounded, hopefully with a few twists, or at least surprises from elements which are otherwise consistent with the world model created in the story.

This story just shoves an ending in your face. It's a mystery, but not a solvable puzzle. Something just happens.

I enjoyed the previous book, Forever Peace, even though it is "disjoint" from the war .. free continuum. Forever Free? Anything but.

Haldeman has a marvelous narrative voice and I enjoy reading just about anything he puts on paper. However...his plots are getting increasingly redundant. Forever Free feels primarily like Worlds Enough and Time from the organization of the interstellar ship, strange events begin happening, and the deus ex machina conclusion. I know Mr. Haldeman is a very intelligent and well read man. I just wish he would find a new way to wrap up his stories.

I loved Forever War and really liked Forever Peace. Forever Free is a terrible successor. Starts off great, then collapses (in the last 20 pages!) into a real Deus ex Machina the ancient Greeks would have been ashamed of. I think Haldeman reached the three-quarters point, got distracted, and just tied everything up as quickly as possible. Considering what he could have accomplished with this, it's even more disappointing.

.... When the publisher/editor(whomever is responsible) goes against the author and names his previous work, the "Forever Peace", as the sequel to the "Forever War", alarms should automatically sound in one's head. Joe Haldeman, states that the "Forever Peace" is NOT a sequel, right there on the cover of said book! They are related only in that both are drawn from his experiences of the Vietnam War. ....

To be clear, this book (and NOT Forever Peace (Remembering Tomorrow)) is the direct sequel to the Forever War.

I'll begin by addressing many of the reviews here. So many reviewers have been using the phrase "deus ex machina" followed brusquely by a comment about literally throwing the book in the trash. However, very few people apparently understand the proper use of the term "deus ex machina". The complaints are misguided, on account of a lack of understanding of the novel. Allow me to explain.

(Spoilers!)

This novel is a sci-fi mystery. At the end of it, the mystery is solved when the extremely strange and increasingly bizarre events of prior pages is explained. It is solved because we meet the mover behind the events. To repeat: this mover has been causing the events to occur all along, but was merely an unseen character until the end because it is, I repeat, a mystery. Now, when used correctly, "deus ex machina" is employed to explain when an outside, godlike character intervenes in an outright plot contrivance to correct all the chaos and tragedy that has gone on with the other characters. The mover at the end of this novel is emphatically *not* an outside character who intervenes suddenly. He has been acting throughout the pages all along. We just finally meet him at the end. The key character behind the events is revealed as the close of the mystery, not a "deus ex machina".

It is true that Haldeman could certainly have taken more care to prepare us better for the ending of the novel. But the reviewers here are dolts for using the phrase "deus ex machina" to encapsulate the theme of their reviews. They have absolutely missed the point of Forever Free.

The book is entertaining and a relatively quick read. It is not the masterpiece of Forever War. But it is satisfying nevertheless when you stop thinking that a "deus ex machina" has occurred, and take a moment to realize the mystery structure of the book, and that the mover behind the events doesn't just swoop in suddenly. He was there, unseen, all along. Not a damn soul on earth says "The Usual Suspects" ended with a deus ex machina when Keyser Söze was revealed to be Kevin Spacey's character!

This book is not a good read. Everything about it is horrible. Haldeman wrote all these really cool books and then he wrote this? The story was just sloppily thrown together and threatens to undo what was so good about The Forever War. I didn't feel like I was reading about the same two people. I thought there was this deep love connection between Mandella and Marygay and that her having waited for him all that time was so sweet and romantic...Then to ruin it with this Cat lady, that was the person that she really loved but decided she wasn't able to wait for...I just started really disliking the book from that point and my opinion of it never improved.

What happened? The Forever War was so good! This was dullness punctuated by the mundane, with no suspense and a cheesy neat wrap up in the last few pages. I kept hoping things would take off, so I kept reading, and as I started to near the end, I realized I'd wasted a whole lot of time.

Despite the bad reviews, I found Forever Free rather enjoyable. Granted, it ends in an unusual way which might be disappointing to some people, however I'd say it's worth a read for those who enjoyed The Forever War, which admittedly ended somewhat better.