The Forever War / Forever Peace / Forever Free or Peace and War - Joe Haldeman

[AlienFTM]

Peace and War is three separate books, The Forever War, Forever Peace and Forever Free in a single omnibus edition. My son recently picked it up in Waterstones.

 

The Forever War, originally written in the mid to late 70s is Haldeman's tribute to his recent Vietnam War, moved to Sci-Fi. I had a first edition paperback which fell apart a few years ago through repeated reading by myself and my son. I have long described it as a perfect book: on the cover of Peace and War, a reviewer makes the same claim.

 

Forever Peace is a direct sequel and just about comparable for quality of read.

 

Haldeman describes Forever Free as not another sequel to The Forever War (because the timings are pretty much contemporaneous with the early stages of The Forever War) but an alternative what-if scenario, more easily related to events since The forever War was written. It is an entirely different story.

 

The first story has a massive twist at the end and two latter stories both have universe-changing finales which I shan't spoil. But if you want an un-put-downable book, don't listen to others: this is the one (three).

 

Maybe you need to be a Sci-Fi fan ... or maybe not.

 

Oh and there's some stuff in the omnibus about why he rewrote part of The Forever War in the early editions to please his publishers before reverting to the original middle in later editions when he knew the book would stand without the edits and he could stand up to the publishers.

 

I think if you buy a recent edition of TFW on its own - I also have this - you'll also get this information.

[Mark]

Sounds good have you got an ISBN number for it

[AlienFTM]

Googling for "Peace and War" +haldeman the first hit was this link:

 

http://www.concatenation.org/frev/peaceandwar.html

 

ISBN, reviews, etc