"Joe Haldeman - The Forever War (2)" - читать интересную книгу автора (Haldeman Joe)

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THE
FOREVER
WAR
Joe Haldeman
THE
FOREVER WAR
AUTHOR'S NOTE
This is the definitive version of The Forever War. There are two other versions, and my publisher
has been kind enough to allow inc to clarify things here.
The one you're holding in your hand is the book as it was originally written. But it has a pretty
tortuous history
It's ironic, since it later won the Hugo and Nebula Awards, and has won "Best Novel" awards in
other countries, but The F~re~er War was not an easy book to sell back in the early scventies. It
was rejected by eighteen publishers before St. Martin's Press decided to take a chance on it.
"Pretty good book," was the usual reaction, "but nobody wants to read a science fiction novel
about Vietnam". 'Rventy-Iive years later, most young readers don't even see the parallels between
The Forever ~l'ar and the seemingly endless one we were involved in at the time, and that's okay.
It's about Vietnam because that's the war the author was in. But it's mainly about war, about
soldiers, and about the reasons we think we need them.
\Vhilc the book was being looked at by all those publishers, it was also being serialized
piecemeal in Analog magazine. The editor, Ben Bova, was a tremendous help, not only in editing,
but also for making the thing exist at all! He gave it a prominent place in the magazine, and it
was also his endorsement that brought it to the attention of St. Martin's Press, who took a chance
on the hardcover, though they did not publish adult science fiction at that time.
But Ben rejected the middle section, a novella called "You Can Never Go Back." He liked it as a
piece of writing, he said, but thought that it was too downbeat for Analog's audience. So I wrote
him a more positive story and put "You Can Never Go Back" into the drawer; eventually Ted White
published it in Amazing magazine, as a coda to The Forever War
At this late date, I'm not sure why I didn't reinstate the original middle when the book was
accepted. Perhaps I didn't trust my own taste, or just didn't want to make life more complicated.
But that first book version is essentially the 4nalog version with "more adult language and
situations", as they say in Hollywood.
The paperback of that version stayed in print for about~ sixteen years. Then in 1991 I had the
opportunity to reinstate my original version, which now appears in Britain for the first time. The
dates in the book are now kind of funny; most people realize we didn't get into an interstellar
war in 1996. I originally set it in that year so it was barely possible that the officers and NCOs
could be veterans of Vietnam, so we decided to leave it that way, in spite of the obvious
anachronisms. Think of it as a parallel universe.
But maybe it's the real one, and we're in a dream.

Joe Haldeman
Cambridge, Massachusetts
THE