Years have passed since the Forever War reached its conclusion, and William Mandella is settled on an icy backwater of a planet, a haven for the minority of remaining humans who aren’t part of the hivemind known as Man. He and his long-lost love are finally married, and together they have raised a son and daughter. But they aren’t content. They know what they are: Fallbacks for Man in case their genetic material is ever needed, kept like pets in a zoo, otherwise obsolete. So they engineer a conspiracy: To commandeer the spaceship which used to serve as a temporal waystation for those who wanted to delay aging until their lost loved ones returned from the collapsars, which now languishes in planetary orbit, and take it as far out as they can. So far that when they return, thousands of years will have passed, and they can only hope that Man will have become extinct and they will have the freedom to establish the human race anew.I’m beginning to think that the best way to read these novels (with the exception of the brilliant first book) is to get to the middle, then stop and make up the rest yourself, because the story you thought you were signing on for is inevitably going to get abandoned in favour of something else entirely. Except unlike Forever Peace, this wasn’t merely muddled, this was actively ridiculous.The plot trundles along quite happily to begin with, even if the characterisation doesn’t. William Mandella was a bit of a blank everyman in The Forever War, but that was okay, because it enhanced the reader’s ability to put themselves in his shoes, and he was still allowed emotional reactions to things. In this novel, he’s more of an automaton, lacking even that much emotional veracity -- I have stronger feelings for the squirrels that live in the trees near my house than he appears to have for his children. But that would’ve been okay too, because I could’ve gone along with this as a plot-driven novel. I was intrigued, excited even, to see what the far, far future that Mandella and his crew would return to would be like, and what their rebuilding efforts would look like if they managed to escape Man.Yeah, don’t get your hopes up. This whole idea gets first derailed by strange things occurring aboard ship during the journey which should’ve been a mere footnote before the return, and then its utter abandonment is forced when the plot swerves in a completely unheralded direction. Nothing that was interesting about the book is allowed any real depth past the midway point. It’s transformed into a trite mystery, trite because the ultimate answer to whodunnit is a literal deus ex machina, with all the philosophical depth, in its heavy-handed delivery, of a door to door proselytiser’s leaflet.Merely thinking of this book and all the wasted potential in its setup annoys me. If you are a fan of The Forever War -- and for all the criticism I level at this book, I am a great fan of its predecessor -- I heartily recommend that you pretend the story ends there, and that this sequel is bad fanfic. It certainly reads like it.Review from Bookette.net
Well now it is Christmas time in Australia, in fact it's evening, so most of the festivity is done and dusted. It's been a good day all said and done and it was a pretty warm one (being Summer). So it is time that I fulfil my promise to get this review written up.In many ways Forever Free is a continuation of the classic science fiction work Forever War. Yet in other ways it is a completely different work. It certainly is an easier work to read. It is more fluid and less imposing on the reader. However it loses the track of what makes a quality science fiction novel!There is an interesting idea about the consequences on an individual if there is no more war. Does a man have to dream up a way to create conflict? Is it part of human nature to desire to fight while peace exists? There is also another idea about the individuality of humanity and about the nature of being part of a whole group but separate entities.In the future world which William Mandella and his wife now live, humanity has become one linked hive-mind entity called Man and lives in harmony with the old enemy alien race. Yet Mandella fears that he and other non Man are being kept as part of an experiment and are not truly free. For freedom is what Joe Haldeman discusses for the first part of his novel and this very first half is in fact a better book than Forever War with what it does. However the second half falls completely off the rails.You see, the way Haldeman decides to wrap up his novel requires literal absurd use of deus-ex machina. (view spoiler)[To be concise: God rocks up, removes most of the characters in the world from existence to give Mandella a message that he's leaving and that is it. (hide spoiler)]
What do You think about Forever Free (2015)?
Don't read this book if you liked The Forever War, as it will ruin any enjoyable moments you might remember from that sci-fi classic.The first book in the Forever War series was intriguing. Not particularly well written or plotted (the action bounced around centuries and locations without much information about the actual war), but the premise and the depictions of changes in society and technology were enough to keep me going till the end. Forever Free has the same writing style and plotting swamp as the first book, but the author took out the fighting, the social commentary, and the storytelling logic. While I was reading, a phrase kept popping into my head, one I remembered from middle school English: Deus ex machina, which means God from the Machine. In every chapter of Forever Free, the phrase kept reappearing in my mind as every difficulty faced is resolved by absurd outside forces which are neither logical nor sane. And then, in a plot twist so off-putting that I physically winced, the God from the machine literally shows up at the end of the book. You will see what I mean if you manage to get that far.
—Lara Hanneman
First off - this actually IS a direct sequel to The Forever War. Unlike Forever Peace, which is a spiritual sequel to The Forever War. I'm curious why he chose to write an actual sequel now...and I hope the answer isn't that he needed to pay some bills (because that's kind of what it felt like).It's a strange, strange book. Much of it didn't really feel like anything to me... just... "things" happening. And then it resolves itself very, very fast in a kind of literal deux ex machina (OK, technically probably more like 2 separate D.E.M.s) that I can't really fault him for, as that was obviously the intent. There are lots of great ideas here and a world that I still find interesting - or would have if it had been fleshed out more. This was like ~250 pages in hardcover. That seems crazy short to me. At least for a $25 book (glad I got it used!). It read as fast as you'd expect. It wasn't badly written - on the contrary it was well written it just wasn't well....fleshed out. Maybe I'm spoiled by modern fantasy and sci-fi epics that spill out over 500 pages - but I wanted more of almost everything. More of Man culture and whatever the aliens were called and more of the third species. Especially the third species. I can't say much more without spoilers, so I think I'll just let it go.THREE STARSThree and a half for ideas, but only three for execution. Needed more flesh on those bones!Now I need to go google around and see what the story behind this thing is.
—Onefinemess
A brave, strange and experimental book shares the same cover as a conventional and perhaps even plodding book. Most of the book until maybe the last 10 per cent moves at a stately, in interesting, if not entirely thrill packed pace. The ideas, mechanics and musing are familiar from The Forever War, as are a few of the characters and although the plot to steal what a amounts to a time travelling space ship is intriguing enough,[spoilers removed]When quite a few pages are spent detailing a health and safety audit that even the protagonist finds boring, I was beginning to lose the will. Then things take a turn for the odd and then they keep going that direction. I would have no argument at all with anyone who jumped ship at that point. That's pretty much the deal with speculative sci fi anyway. There is almost always a point at which anyone can say 'I can't buy into this' for whatever reason and at that point the magic is gone. The magic stayed working for me. It's potentially daft, there's a hell of a lot of talking and characters roll along with the apparently impossible happening around them with alarming ease but even so, there are some great ideas here and they are expressed with welcome clarity. They are also what stop this being just a short story and give it the heft to be called a novel. As peculiar a sequel to an action novel as I can imagine but one of the reasons I rarely read series is that it can all get a bit samey over time. This, eventually, swerved around that pot hole/collapsar, what have you.
—Tomo20
