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Type of bind: Mass Market Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.54
EAN num: 9780441005666
ISBN number: 0441005667
Label: Ace
Manufacturer: Ace
Quantity: 1
Page Count: 368
Printing Date: October 01, 1998
Publishing house: Ace
Sale Popularity Level: 37641
Studio: Ace
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Editor's Notes and Comments:
Brief Book Summary:
In the year 2043, the Ngumi War rages. Limited nuclear strikes have been used on Atlanta and two enemy cities, but the war goes on, fought by 'soldierboys' -- indestructible war machines operated by remote control by soldiers hundreds of miles away.
Julian Class is one of these soldiers, and for him war is truly hell. The psychological strain of being jacked-in to his soldierboy -- and the genocidal results -- are becoming too much to bear. Now he and his companion, Dr Amelia Harding, have made a terrifying scientific discovery, which could literally take the universe back to square one. Except that for Julian, the discovery isn't so much terrifying as tempting....
Amazon.com:
Julian Class is a full-time professor and part-time combat veteran who spends a third of each month virtually wired to a robotic 'soldierboy.' The soldierboys, along with flyboys and other advanced constructs, allow the U.S. to wage a remotely controlled war against constant uprisings in the Third World. The conflicts are largely driven by the so-called First World countries' acess to nanoforges--devices that can almost instantly manufacture any product imaginable, given the proper raw materials--and the Third World countries' lack of acess to these devices. But even as Julian learns that the consensual reality shared by soldierboy operators can lead to universal peace, the nanoforges create a way for humanity to utterly destroy itself, and it will be a race against time to see which will happen first. Although Forever Peace bears a title similar to Joe Haldeman's classic novel The Forever War, he says it's not a sequel.
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Rated by buyers 
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...but I wasn't really thrilled with it. Some interesting concepts introduced, but that's a about all.
Rated by buyers 
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Forever Peace is the second book by Joe Handelman to win both the Hugo and Nebula awards. He also achieved this doubly prestigious honor before with his book The Forever War, which I have previously read and reviewed and greatly enjoyed.
Unfortunately, Forever Peace is not as well-written as The Forever War, although it is as inventive. That's part of the problem. There are two great ideas in The Forever War: the notion that some percentage of humans have the ability to be "jacked" so that all sensory input can be shared between two or more people AND the discovery that a long-running astrophysical experiment to recreate the Big Bang will actually destroy a significant portion of our Galaxy and there is a secret society that has infiltrated the Government that believes that it is God's will that the Universe be destroyed.
Either one of these ideas would have been enough to make a pretty decent sciemce fiction novel. However, in Forever Peace I think that Haldeman over-reaches and tries to include two ideas that really don't have much to do with each other. In general, I am a fan of sci-fi books that are brimming with ideas but there's just something ill-posed about the way the ideas in Forever Peace seem to unspool. I was quite surprised, because most reviews seem to think that it is at least as a good as The Forever War but I had difficulty finishing it (and was not really invested in the main character's well-being) which was not the case with The Forever War, which is really a collection of short stories and novellas that feature the same character.
Forever Peace and The Forever War are not really sequels, their similarities are in their author and they both are told from the first-person perspective of a soldier in aseemingly unterminable war. Forever Peace does not distinguish itself in a head-to-head cmparison between the two, but is still worth a try (after reading The Forever War).
OVERALL GRADE: B+.
IMPACT: B-.
IDEAS: A.
WRITING: B.
Rated by buyers -
Class war is part-time for some.
The main character here is an academic, but also a part-time soldier, who assists in fighting wars by proxy against the third-world to ensure that their use of nanotech doesn't affect the profits of wealthier nations.
He is researching cosmology in a big way on top of that, so is where the action is in many cases, as a large scale project in the outer solar system has his input.
3.5 out of 5
Rated by buyers 
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One interesting note on this book is that it lacks chapter numbers. No big deal really, but when you read the end of one passage and the beginning of the next, the two passages butt up right subsequent to each other. Therefore, it reads just like one story, unhinged and unadulterated, from beginning to end. It flows, it sings and its entirely powerful on many levels.
Everything from technology and characters were all meaningful and original. Relationships between all involved spun a deep, complex plot that unraveled itself page by page. Solid - my kind of book.
Rated by buyers -
I found myself having 2 issues with this book. First was the timeline of action. I found it difficult to determine if the scene I was reading was a flashback, a flashforward, or a 'here and now'. The very first half of the book was very strange in this way. Made things a bit difficult to follow, but I plowed through it.
My other issue was the acceptance of what the 'good guys' were trying to do in this book. When you find yourself completely disagreeing with the 'good guys' method of 'fixing things', I think it jades you against the outcome of the book. No, I wasn't pro world destruction, but I found Haldemann's premise that humanity would simply 'accept' being 'jacked' as ridiculously stupid. "Fix" the human race by surgical modification and electronic manipulation. No thanks, I'll stay broken. I don't buy in to it. And that's where the book fails me. It ends mired in stupidity.
While the story had promise, and the book is worth a read, the utopian vision of "fixing humanity" is too much of a stretch for me to garner much pleasure from the read.
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