>I agree that Haldeman's is an "obnoxious novel." I can't understand why
>serious people praise it: it was pressed into my hands by an intelligent
>friend (a NY Times reporter, as it happens) who insisted it was marvelous.
>It's not. ..Even the semi-fascism of Starship Troopers is
>more thoughtful and more entertaining than the semi-liberalism of Forever
>Peace
I agree that Forever Peace is a great disappointment, but the Forever War is still one of the great SF novels, especially daring when written, since it was a flat-out assault on the Vietnam War and the racism of the whole effort The ideas of soldiers taken out of time by relativity was a brilliant metaphor for the culture shock experienced by returning soldiers in a period of rapid social change.
>Asimov's "idea-mongering" made him a low-level version of Gertrude Stein's
>village explainer ("excellent if you were a village, but if you were not,
>not"). But he led me to Marx, who wasn't part of my secondary-school
>curriculum: he said that he'd based the Foundation series, which I'd
>liked, on Toynbee -- so I went to Toynbee (in the Somervell abridgement)
>and found that there was only one other meta-historical account...
I think there was a discussion here a while ago about the more recent Foundation trilogy, done by new writers, which turned Asimov's progressive left views into a rightwing version of his vision, a kind of mirror image of what Verhoeven did to Heinlein.
-- Nathan Newman