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Obligatory Political Statement/Working on My Reading List
3 years ago
For those of us in Western Russia and... pretty much all of the former SovBloc countries at this point. Stay safe and keep your heads down.
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Finally and perhaps ironically, I finally started reading The Forever War by Joe Haldeman. Specifically the reprint with a foreword from John Scalzi (more on that in a second.) Been meaning to read it for awhile now as I've already read all of David Drake's Hammer's Slammer's novels and got through most of the Starfist books by David Sherman and Dan Cragg. All I need to do is read Haldeman's work and then I'd have the perspectives of really the three main military sci-fi writers from the US-Vietnam war era.
Still reading and looking forward to seeing how it ends for main character Mandella but so far, I've been drawing two big impressions:
- John Scalzi, author of the foreword in my copy of The Forever War, is a complete douchebag. His foreword is smug, arrogant, and manages to make it about himself while still talking about Haldeman, basically encapsulating everything that is wrong with the modern literary scene. If I didn't have any interest in Old Man's War before, I definitely don't after that foreword.
- Where as Sherman and Cragg maintained the stance that "War Is Heroic" and Drake took the stance that "War is a Necessary Evil", Haldeman just goes straight "War Is Vile and Wasteful." There is a subtle cynicism that coats everything from the snippets of background we get for every character to the description of the battles with the aliens and in general the novel has a very dark undertone. Still reading because I want to see how it all ends.
We will now return to your regularly scheduled programming
Finally and perhaps ironically, I finally started reading The Forever War by Joe Haldeman. Specifically the reprint with a foreword from John Scalzi (more on that in a second.) Been meaning to read it for awhile now as I've already read all of David Drake's Hammer's Slammer's novels and got through most of the Starfist books by David Sherman and Dan Cragg. All I need to do is read Haldeman's work and then I'd have the perspectives of really the three main military sci-fi writers from the US-Vietnam war era.
Still reading and looking forward to seeing how it ends for main character Mandella but so far, I've been drawing two big impressions:
- John Scalzi, author of the foreword in my copy of The Forever War, is a complete douchebag. His foreword is smug, arrogant, and manages to make it about himself while still talking about Haldeman, basically encapsulating everything that is wrong with the modern literary scene. If I didn't have any interest in Old Man's War before, I definitely don't after that foreword.
- Where as Sherman and Cragg maintained the stance that "War Is Heroic" and Drake took the stance that "War is a Necessary Evil", Haldeman just goes straight "War Is Vile and Wasteful." There is a subtle cynicism that coats everything from the snippets of background we get for every character to the description of the battles with the aliens and in general the novel has a very dark undertone. Still reading because I want to see how it all ends.
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