Forever Free (Gollancz November 2000, ISBN 978-1857989311, 288pp) is the sequel to The Forever War, Joe Haldeman's award laden classic. It took Haldeman almost a quarter of a century to return to the lives of William Mandella and Marygay Potter-Mandella, and while it's an interesting novel, part of its poor reception arose from the unfulfilled expectations of its readers.
At the end of The Forever War , Mandella and Marygay were allowed to leave the army and live on the 'eugenic control baseline' planet (p230) of Middle Finger, or MF as it's also known.
The Book of Genesis
As Forever Free opens it becomes quickly clear that Middle Finger is no garden planet, unless that garden is sub-Siberian. Man has become a human group mind with whom the colonists co-exist uneasily, and the planet's climate reinforces the claustrophobic atmosphere of the novel's opening section.
The Book of Changes
William and Marygay are acutely aware that their presence poses an embarrassment for Man, which is considering closing down their genetic insurance policy, and that MF is basically a prison world. Although the vets do their best to live within such close confines, they leap at the opportunity to take a relatavistic shuttle ride across the universe. However, the philosophical question of what it means to be human is never really properly explored and Man is never really depicted in more than hints. Instead Mandella's reaction seems entirely knee-jerk.
The Book of Exodus
For Mandella's proposal is to steal an old starship and use the time dilation effects which underpinned The Forever War to jump 40,000 years into the future. The possibilities are that nothing will have changed, but Mandella's hope is that either 'ordinary' humans will have reasserted themselves, or that even better Man will have died out altogether, leaving an empty universe for Mandella's group to settle.
The Book of the Dead
It's at this point that Forever Free takes off in an entirely unexpected and not entirely successful direction. When the Time Warp is forced to return to MF, they find the colony a planet-sized Marie Celeste, abandoned unexpectedly according to the evidence. The logic by which Mandella and the others decide that the answer is on Earth seems contrived, but nonetheless this is where they decide the answers lie and head off to find another planet abandoned to the robots of Disneyland.
The Book of Apocrypha
(Warning: Spoiler Alert!)
It emerges that our universe is one huge experiment, and that just as Man decided to close down MF, so the Omnis have decided to close down the experiment that is our universe. It's at this point that the Biblical allusions of the section headers ('The Book of Genesis, the Book of Revelations,' etc) become relevant. For in having revisited the universe of two much-loved characters, Haldeman then chooses to undermine them with a huge deus ex machina. For the mystery ends in exposition, a solution which leaves the reader little chance of deducing what has happened.
The Book of Revelations
The real problem of Forever Free is that if it had been plotted and written from scratch, it would received mixed reviews, but they would in all likelihood have been kinder than the reaction to a sequel to one of the most acclaimed novels of all time. Instead Haldeman chooses to render everything that's gone before quasi-irrelevant.
Colin Harvey - Author six novels, and editor of four anthologies; professional reviewer since 2003, including six years at Strange Horizons. Member of ...
