Joe Haldeman

Joe Haldeman (1943- )

"Life begins in a bloody mess and sometimes it ends the same way, and only odd people seek out blood between those times, maybe crazy people."

-- Joe Haldeman

Joe Haldeman's vision of the universe was profoundly shaped by the Vietnam War. Vietnam surfaces as a theme, a backdrop, or a reference point in many of his stories. Born in Oklahoma and raised in Puerto Rico, New Orleans, Washington D.C. and Alaska, Haldeman was drafted in 1967. He fought in the Central Highlands of Vietnam as a combat engineer with the 4th Division. He received a Purple Heart for severe wounds he suffered during the war.

Haldeman's wrenching personal experiences enable him to write about war with a rare, brutal honesty. What's intriguing is that while many of his obsessions are with the past, his favorite way of exploring those issues is through representations of the future.

His first novel, War Year (1972) was a realistic account of the war. His second, The Forever War (1975) read the conflict through the filter of "space opera," and in turn, radically rewrote the conventions of that subgenre. Bran Aldiss has described the core Space Opera formula:

"Ideally the Earth must be in peril, there must be a quest and a man to watch the mighty hour. That man must confront aliens and exotic creatures. Space must flow past the ports like wine from a pitcher. Blood must run down the palace steps, and ships launch out into the louring deep. There must be a woman fairer than the skies and a villain darker than the Black Hole. And all must come right in the end."

This formula shaped science fiction's representation of war -- from the lusty pulp sagas of E.E. "Doc" Smith to Robert Heinlein's Starship Troopers and George Lucas's Star Wars trilogy. The "Space Opera" subgenre depended upon a peculiarly American conception of war, grounded in idealism, optimism, technological power and a simple black-and-white morality. But, the Vietnam experience changed how Americans understood the nature of war, and Haldeman's Forever War demonstrates how absurd many of the old cliches look to someone who had seen real combat duty.

His writing is blunt, earthy, and anti-heroic. His battle sequences are as technically detailed and vivid as any in science fiction. But, his war is anything but a glorious adventure. Haldeman depicts war as the pathetic slaughter of an enemy incapable of defending itself. More of his characters die in accidents training for battle (or of shock when they must confront the horror of their own actions) than in their initial military action against the Taurans. Much of their time is spent waiting and only a fraction is spent ducking and covering, trying to stay alive in the face of enemy attack.

The causes of the "forever war" are murky; his protagonists are fighting against an enemy they can not comprehend. No one really knows what started the war or why the stakes are so high.

The book's anti-hero never has any real sense of what he is fighting to protect. Private William Mandella is a draftee, chosen because of his superior intellect and education. (Of course, during the Vietnam era, college boys were exempted from the draft!) He feels himself to be fundamentally unsuited for military life, yet the military gives him few options except to re-enlist, blacklisting him from all other employment.

Using ships that travel faster than light, the fighting takes him light years from earth. The campaigns take a subjective time of months, but span centuries in human history back home.

Mandella is one of the few who survives nearly 1,200 years of war. He has no family, few friends and those few can be killed or transferred at any moment. As the war progresses, he has little or no chance to understand the men placed under his command, since they are products of Earth cultures about which he knows nothing. Late in the book, Mandella poignantly calculates whom he might save in an emergency: "The thought did dip into my conscience that I could gather up eleven people and board the fighter we had hidden safe behind the stasis field....I even went to the extreme of making a mental list of the eleven, trying to think of eleven people who meant more to me than the rest. Turned out I'd be picking six at random."

Under such circumstances, war becomes meaningless, a situation no one controls, as the protagonist learns as he moves from raw recruit to commanding officer without ever getting a firm grasp on the events around him.

Truth is, of course, the first casualty of war. In The Forever War, Haldeman gives us several intriguing glimpses of how public opinion is artificially shaped to build and maintain support for the prolonged fighting. In the war's early years, soldiers are pumped with hypnotic suggestions to insure that they conceptualize the war and the enemy in propagandistic terms, images which are triggered by a centralized command just as the troops move into combat:

My mind reeled under the strong pseudo-memories: Shaggy hulks that were Taurans (not at all what we now knew they looked like) boarding a colonists' vessel, eating babies while mothers watched in screaming terror (The colonists never took babies; they wouldn't stand the acceleration), then raping the women to death with huge veined purple members (ridiculous that they would feel desire for humans), holding the men down while they plucked flesh from their living bodies and gobbled it (as if they could assimilate the alien protein)....A hundred grisly details as sharply remembered as the events of a minute ago, ridiculously overdone and logically absurd. But while my conscious mind was rejecting the silliness, somewhere much deeper, down in that sleeping animal where we keep our real motives and morals, something was thirsting for alien blood, secure in the conviction that the noblest thing a man could do would be to die killing one of those horrible monsters. I knew it was all purest soyashit, and I hated the men who had taken such obscene liberties with my mind, but I could even hear my teeth grinding, feel my cheeks frozen in a spastic grin, blood-lust.

These images mirror common themes in wartime propaganda, including those promulgated by publications like Reader's Digest throughout the Vietnam War.

Those back home receive no more reliable information. When he returns home after his first hitch, Mandella tries to correct misperceptions about the war, but finds his words re-edited or fabricated by the news media: "He had kept me talking and talking in order to get a wide spectrum of sounds, from which he could synthesize any kind of nonsense." If Mandella is not exactly the hero we anticipate from a space opera, the news media transforms him into one for the purposes of shaping popular opinion.

Worlds, the first of a major trilogy, offers Haldeman's take on the student "revolutions" of the 1960s. His protagonist, Marianne O'Hara, comes to NYU from an off-world colony to major in American Studies and finds herself pulled deeper and deeper into political conspiracies. What begins as a "research project" in comparative political and economic cultures ends up being a matter of life and death. She is never sure whether she is working for or against the overthrow of the government, struggling to find the truth despite constant manipulations of information from all parties. Haldeman places no more faith in revolutions than he does in war.

The problem of communication between alien cultures runs through his work, often with good intentions ending badly for all involved, as in the slaughter that ensues as a result of an ill-considered and ill-informed ethnographic expedition in "Seasons." As a Xeologist in "Seasons" explains:

In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, old style, there were dozens of isolated cultures still existing without metals or writing or even, in some cases, agriculture or social organization beyond the family. None of them survived more than a couple of generations beyond their contact with civilization.... The records are fascinating not only for the information about the primitives, but also for what they reveal of the investigating culture's unconscious prejudices. My own specialties were the Maori and Eskimo tribe and (by necessary association) the European and American cultures that investigated and more or less benignly destroyed them.

"A Tangled Web" offers a more comic (and somewhat more optimistic) take on what happens when businessmen confuse mastery over a language with understanding of an alien culture. The message seems to be that if we could so badly misunderstood our enemy in Vietnam, we are ill-equipped to deal with even more alien cultures who come to us from other worlds.

"Ghosts," memories of the war, haunt Haldeman's writing. A recurring theme in his fiction is the image of characters circling through the same traumatic event, again and again, trying either to achieve some moment of clarity or to avert fate. In "The Cure," the protagonist restages the same disturbing dream many times, trying to find an ending free of bloodshed. Images of brutal violence -- a rotting body in the jungle, the smell of burning flesh, the gurgle of blood -- surface in many Haldeman stories, appearing, often with startling intensity, when we least expect them. The war's impact on Haldeman's fiction can be seen in his titles, such as Planet of Judgement, All My Sins Remembered, Study War No More, Vietnam and Other Alien Worlds, and 1968.

Haldeman writes across many different genres, ranging from supernatural horror to hard science fiction, from psychodrama to broad satire, from spy thrillers to Star Trek novelizations. Yet underlying most of his stories is a sense of discomfort and dread. "The Cure" opens with a virtuoso passage, evoking almost all of the major genres of popular fiction, yet in each the protagonist seems doomed to an all-but-certain death.

His protagonists must often struggle with wounds (both psychological and physical) frequently linked to their wartime experiences. In "The Hemingway Hoax," a series of time paradoxes allows the protagonists to shift consciousness from body to body across a string of parallel universes. Each of his bodies was wounded in a different place during the same wartime incident. An inch higher or lower marks the dramatic difference between sexual potency and life-long pain. "Images" describes a healing erotic encounter between a man and a woman, each badly scarred, each so self-conscious about their bodies that they have cut themselves off from all sexual outlets except voyeurism.

Many of these shattering experiences result in profound alienation from the body. The protagonists in The Forever War become estranged from their own flesh, when new limbs are grown to replace amputated parts; no one else can tell that their bodies have been altered, yet they still have difficulty bonding with their "prosthesis." A doctor warns two lovers, both amputee patients, that "you're going to constantly trigger memories of pain and loss for each other." "More Than the Sum of the Parts" pushes this theme further, showing how the cybernetic replacement of human flesh results in a gradual loss of all ties to the human body.

Haldeman's stories recognize the psychic costs of mutilation more fully than most contemporary writers who have envisioned a culture of casual body modifications. He also writes stories in which humans coldly calculate the value of their body parts and sacrifice them for other ends. "None So Blind" imagines a time when humans will intentionally blind themselves to achieve "second sight." Cybernetic replacements allowed humans to expand their access to the "unused parts" of their brains. Human competitiveness insures that most people in intellectual fields are willing to put their eyes out rather than to fall behind: "If your department chair is secondsighted and you are not, do you think you'll get tenure?"

His protagonists find release from the "wounds" and "traumas" that torment them only through the intimacy of sex or the exhilaration of artistic creation. Haldeman's writing is full of vivid and detailed descriptions of the process of researching and writing fiction ("The Hemingway Hoax," "Seven and the Stars"), the creation of a painting ("Feedback,") the staging of a play ("Images,") the performance of classical music ("None So Blind") or the improvisation of jazz (Worlds). In "None So Blind," a blind woman's violin functions as a prosthesis:

For thirteen years she had been using it to say what she could not say with her voice, perhaps to see what she could not see with her eyes, and on the deceptively simple romantic matrix that Massent built to present the beautiful courtesan Thais gloriously reborn as the bride of Christ, Amy forgave her godless universe for taking her sight, and praised it for what she was given in return.

"Feedback" offers an intriguing metaphor for artistic collaboration. A gifted artist melds his mind and consciousness with his clients, allowing his technical skills to guide their hands so that they can achieve their own visions on canvas: "All an art facilitator does is loan his or her mechanical skills and esthetic sensibilities to the customer. If the customer is a nutcase, the collaboration may be truly disturbing -- and perhaps revealing."

As he explains in the introductions to his collections of short fiction, Haldeman's stories often grow from the exercises he assigns the students in his science fiction writing classes at MIT. These works suggest a constant desire to explore the creative process and to experiment with the storytelling craft. Although Haldeman is no "nutcase," the results are often "truly disturbing -- and perhaps revealing."

This combination of writerly skill, esthetic sensibility, and self-exploration has made him one of the most widely acclaimed of contemporary American science fiction writers. Haldeman has won four Hugo Awards (for The Forever War, "Tricentennial," "The Hemingway Hoax" and "None So Blind") and three Nebula Awards (for The Forever War, "Graves," "The Hemingway Hoax"). He served as President of Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America from 1992-1994.

Stephen King has written, "If there was a Fort Knox for science fiction writers who really matter, we'd have to lock Haldeman up there." Luckily, Haldeman still roams free, sometimes at MIT, sometimes in Florida, sometimes on one of his cross- country bike trips, but always creating poignant, disturbing, and original stories, set in the future, but designed to help America deal with a troubled past.

Selected Works
	1972 War Year 1974 Cosmic Laughter 1975 The Forever War 1976 Mindbridge 1977 Planet of Judgement 1977 All My Sins Remembered 1977 Study War No More 1978 Infinite Dreams 1979 World Without End 1981 Worlds 1983 Worlds Apart 1985 Dealing in Futures 1987 Tool of the Trade 1989 Buying Time 1990 The Hemingway Hoax 1992 Worlds Enough and Time 1993 Vietnam and Other Alien Worlds 1995 1968 1996 None So Blind 1997 The Forever Peace
--H.J.