I've not read anything in years. I was recommended 3 Body Problem but hear it starts very slow and I could do with something easy and engaging.
Think mindless action film but in book form. To keep my attention and make me read. Get back in the habit.
Likes:
- Dark Materials trilogy.
- Horror - esp. Graham Masterton
- Non-fiction - love popular science books and history.
- Sci fi
- Short stories
I recommend the Forever War by Joe Haldeman, it's kind of dated and amateurish and weird in a Heinlein kinda way
Forever War and Forever Free are an amazing duo. I don’t think they are amateurish though, Haldeman writes these exactly as they need to be to represent the difficulty Vietnam vets faced returning home.
Edit: I confused the novels Forever Free and Forever Peace. Forever Free is the duet to Forever War, while Forever Peace is disconnected but plays with similar themes as both Forever War and Ender’s Game.
I like how humanity becomes a literal hivemind of Polynesians it rules but also making the enemies a totally mindless drone hivemind is pretty yikesy tbqhbbq
It's interesting in that historical sense idk if I agree about whether it really expresses something we need to get abt the vets suffering after the war or something though haha, and that when he comes back from the time skip everyone is a hivemind of Polynesians.
The hivemind is an analogy for the way the average person had turned on the war and viewed it as a national disgrace. Just watch that opening act of Rambo, the soldiers returning from Nam late in the conflict came home to joblessness and derision. A far cry from the parades and support of the GI bill the generation before had.
Haldeman is trying to show a universal truth of long wars, at some point the home you left stops existing, and you return to a place that isn’t what you fought for in the first place, though of course Haldeman takes this to absurdity almost. Like many vets of Vietnam Mandela and his fellow soldiers are now so feared and removed that society doesn’t have a mechanism for integration. Haldeman uses genetic and cultural shifts to represent the more subtle social ones.