The Forever War

I read this when it first came out, as a series: then I bought the book, then I bought the combined book, then I bought the Kindle version...it's that good. It's the complete antidote to the rah-rah chauvinism of "Starship Troopers" for when you grow out of Heinlein (as one does) - and very, very well written to boot.

Possibly the most important feature of the book (and its sequels) is that (1) no-one seems to know much about the enemy; (2) the rather chaotic war is fought in relativistic time. That means there are no wormholes, no FTL drives, and no teleportation - and decades if not centuries elapse between missions, with all of the dislocation and technology jumps THAT entails.

Haldeman deals with all of these issues superbly: the one thing that jars in this modern age is the assumption that the men and women (yes, he included women) in the military HAVE to have sex with each other, regularly. Very sixties! It is more intriguing when, in the reasonably far future, people go homosexual in the true sense - and the only heteros left are the ones that came from our era.

All in all, though, this is a superb piece of work.