Dear Joe,
To get this letter to you started, and to set the scene for a theme I’ll get back to, I want to remind you (and share with the onlookers reading this letter to you) about the first time I met both you and Gay, which was at the Worldcon in Glasgow in 2005. I forget the specific manner in which we were introduced—I suspect my editor Patrick Nielsen Hayden may have made the introduction, as introducing science fictional people to each other is something he’s very good at. I remember saying hello and then being marvelously flattered as Gay told me that she had enjoyed Old Man’s War, which was at the time my sole novel, having come out six months earlier. After she was done saying very nice things about it, you said, “I’ve heard good things about it, but I’m afraid I haven’t read it yet.”
“That’s all right,” I said. “I’ve heard good things about The Forever War, and I haven’t read it, either.” To which you laughed, and then you and I and Gay went on to have a very nice conversation about other things. So that’s how we met.
Let me note two things about our meeting: first, you were entirely gracious to me in the aftermath of my attempted witty banter, because in retrospect (i.e., three seconds later) I could see how the comment might have seemed snarky and dismissive, even if it was not meant that way (fortunately for me, you took it the right way); second, in terms of high science fictional crimes and misdemeanors, mine, in not having read your novel, was a far sight greater than yours in not reading mine. My novel was the work of a newbie writer who only a few people knew existed (thus my pleasure in Gay’s having read it at all), whereas your novel was (and remains) a science fiction classic—a winner of the Hugo, Nebula, and Locus awards, widely recognized as one of the two cornerstone works of military science fiction, along with Starship Troopers. You could be forgiven for not having gotten around to my book. I, on the other hand, did not get off so easily.
Indeed, it’s a measure of the significance of The Forever War in science fiction literature that readers and reviewers simply assumed (a) that I had read it of course, and (b) that my own novel of military science fiction was riffing off of yours to some greater or lesser extent. When I admitted to people that, in fact, I had not read your book, I usually got one of two reactions, depending on whether they liked my book or not.
Here’s the one for if they liked the book:
Reader: I liked your book, man. I really like how you played the changes off of The Forever War in it.
Me: Well, thank you. But I have to admit I haven’t read The Forever War yet.
Reader: Really?
Me: Yeah.
Reader: Have you been, like, trapped in a box for the past thirty years?
Here’s the one for when they didn’t like it:
Reader: Jeez, Scalzi, I sure hope you’re paying Joe Haldeman royalties for how much you ripped off The Forever War.
Me: Well, actually, I haven’t read the book.
Reader: Uh-huh. So you’re not only a thief, you’re also a liar.
So it went, for a few years, until, in fact, I actually did start lying about whether I’d read the book, because I was tired of being told I needed to read it. I knew I needed to read it, you know? But I was busy, writing my own books—and, um, being distracted by shiny bits of foil. Yes, that was it. That was it exactly.
Finally, for various reasons, this last year I came to a time and place where I was ready for The Forever War. I took it down from the shelf (where it had been, actually, for a few years—did I mention that I am easily distractible?), closed the door of my office, and settled down for a good read.
When I finished it, this was the thought I had about it: Wow, I’m glad I waited until now to read this.
Really, I was—and am.
There are two reasons for this. The first is a simple and practical writing matter: If I had known going in about all the plot and character choices you made in your novel, I probably wouldn’t have ended up making the same basic choices in mine. Because, you know, as a writer I have an ego, and I wouldn’t have wanted to step in your footprints, and walked a path you had, even if it were better for my novel to have done so. I would have been self-conscious of it; I would have danced around certain footfalls, and I suspect my own novel would have not been the better for it. There’s a whole other letter I could write, unpacking this statement and what it means, but I won’t get into that now; suffice it to say for the moment that I would have felt like I would have to be original, even to the detriment of being good. It’s easier on the finished end of the writing process to be compared to The Forever War (flattering, too); on the writing end, it would have been an elephant in my head—too much pressure; thanks, no. I’m happy to have missed that. The second reason is that I believe that The Forever War was a novel of its time, and its time, for better or worse, has come around again.
It’s no secret, to you or me or most of the people peering over our shoulders here, that The Forever War comes out of the crucible of the Vietnam War, in which you served, and which, as I understand, marked you for its own, as it did with many who served in it. Science fiction as a genre has the benefit of being able to act as parable, to set up a story at a remove so you can make a real-world point without people throwing up a wall in front of it. You’d already essayed your experience in Vietnam in the contemporary novel War Year (which I had actually read, and gave to my father-in-law, himself a veteran, as a gift), but The Forever War was another, bigger bite of that apple—your chance to explain to people who hadn’t been there the confusion and bureaucracy, the muddled aims and random horror, and the alienation that those who went felt when they came back home to a nation and culture that they no longer quite fit into, because both had changed.
I grew up as part of the fortunate generation between Vietnam and 9/11, the ones whose cohort didn’t have to experience what war was, save for a few short weeks in Grenada and Iraq, in ’91. There’s another generation, behind mine, that did not get to be so lucky. Hundreds of thousands of them went to the Middle East and a good portion of them are still there. Thousands have come back with flags draped over their coffins. Tens of thousands have come back injured, physically or mentally or both, and some portion of them feel the same disassociation to the land they’ve returned to that Mandella and Marygay felt with theirs. Whether one feels the war in Iraq or Afghanistan is right and necessary or not, there’s no doubt a generation will be marked by it and claimed by it.
To my mind, there are two things that make a novel a “classic”—a genuine classic, as opposed to merely “old and continuing to sell.” The first is that it speaks to the time in which the novel first appeared. There is no doubt The Forever War did this; its awards and acclaim are signifiers of that fact. The second thing is tougher, and that is that it keeps speaking to readers outside its time, because what’s in the book touches on something that never goes away, or at the very least keeps coming around.
I also think there’s no doubt The Forever War is doing this, too, right now, in this time—it’s a parable whose lessons need to be learned once more. Like its hero, the book has come through time to be part of something; in this case it’s to be a reminder to all those who are looking to come home again—and those who care about them—that there’s someone who’s been where they are now, and who knows what they feel, and why. Maybe it will help them find their way back. I would have missed the power of that if I had read the novel earlier than this. I’m aware of it now—and glad for it.
All of which is to say: Hey, Joe, I read your book.
Everyone is right about it.
Thank you.
Yours,
John Scalzi
July 2008