Books like The Forever War
What should you read after Joe Haldeman’s novel? It depends on what you loved most about it.
- Joe Haldeman
- 1974
- Military science fiction
What did you love about it?
Choosing one reorders everything below.
Best books to read after The Forever War
Ranked overall. Pick what you loved above to re-rank them.
Best overall matchEnder's Game
Orson Scott Card
The other novel about a war fought by people who are never told what it is for, and the bill that arrives when they finally find out.
- A war nobody can explain
- A soldier promoted past his ability
- Vietnam written as science fiction
- A child protagonist
Worth a look — with a warningDune
Frank Herbert
Both books are about a soldier carried by machinery larger than himself into a role he did not choose, but Herbert is grand where Haldeman is deliberately small.
- A soldier promoted past his ability
- A war nobody can explain
- 688 pages, ceremonial pacing
Great matchFoundation
Isaac Asimov
Asimov's structure does what relativity does to Mandella: jumps you forward until everyone you knew is history and the institutions have quietly become something else.
- Society rewritten while you were away
- Time dilation costing you everything
- No emotional cost registered
Great matchHyperion
Dan Simmons
Contains a soldier's tale and a relativity-wrecked love story that are direct descendants of this book, inside a much larger and stranger structure.
- Time dilation costing you everything
- Coming home to a stranger planet
- Six stories, no resolution
Great matchNeuromancer
William Gibson
A veteran whose body was rebuilt and discarded by the people who owned it, moving through a world that has no use for him. Same alienation, no uniform.
- Coming home to a stranger planet
- Dry, unheroic narration
- Cyberpunk crime, not warfare
Worth a look — with a warningSnow Crash
Neal Stephenson
Shares the appetite for combat worked out mechanically and a society that has reorganised into shapes the protagonist finds absurd — but Stephenson is having fun.
- Physics that constrains the combat
- Society rewritten while you were away
- Comic and manic in tone
Best for the sexual politicsThe Left Hand of Darkness
Ursula K. Le Guin
Written five years earlier and doing seriously what Haldeman does as shock: a society whose sexual arrangements make the protagonist permanently foreign.
- Society rewritten while you were away
- Coming home to a stranger planet
- No combat, no military
Worth a look — with a warningThe Book of the New Sun
Gene Wolfe
A soldier's memoir from a future so distant the reader is the confused one, narrated by a man whose account you cannot take at face value.
- Dry, unheroic narration
- Time dilation costing you everything
- Deliberately difficult reading
Great matchRed Mars
Kim Stanley Robinson
Robinson runs his physics as strictly as Haldeman runs his relativity, and watches a society reinvent itself while his characters are stuck living through it.
- Physics that constrains the combat
- Society rewritten while you were away
- Very long, very slow
Best for the soldier's experienceOld Man's War
John Scalzi
Scalzi's open homage: recruits given rebuilt bodies, sent to fight aliens for reasons nobody explains, and cut off from the Earth they signed away.
- Coming home to a stranger planet
- A war nobody can explain
- Physics that constrains the combat
- Cheerful where Haldeman is grim
Worth a look — with a warningThe Wheel of Time
Robert Jordan
Jordan served in Vietnam too, and the war weariness shows — but this is fourteen volumes of epic fantasy, roughly the opposite of Haldeman's compression.
- Vietnam written as science fiction
- A soldier promoted past his ability
- Fourteen enormous volumes
Great matchThe Martian Chronicles
Ray Bradbury
Bradbury's colonists also keep arriving to find that Earth has moved on without them, and he writes the loneliness of that better than anyone.
- Coming home to a stranger planet
- Vietnam written as science fiction
- Linked stories, not a novel
Worth a look — with a warningThe Chronicles of Amber
Roger Zelazny
Zelazny's dry, wisecracking first person is a close relative of Mandella's, and his hero also loses centuries — though to family politics rather than physics.
- Dry, unheroic narration
- Time dilation costing you everything
- Fantasy, and quite silly
What should you read after The Forever War?
The Forever War by Joe Haldeman works on several levels at once, and which book you should read next depends on which of those levels got you. For most readers the closest match is Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card — the other novel about a war fought by people who are never told what it is for, and the bill that arrives when they finally find out.
If what stayed with you was a soldier promoted past his ability, read Dune by Frank Herbert instead: both books are about a soldier carried by machinery larger than himself into a role he did not choose, but Herbert is grand where Haldeman is deliberately small. Foundation by Isaac Asimov is the other strong option — asimov's structure does what relativity does to Mandella: jumps you forward until everyone you knew is history and the institutions have quietly become something else.
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