Joe Haldeman has done well with the word "forever." In 1976, he won the Hugo Award for The Forever War, a classic of military SF that answered Robert Heinlein's Starship Troopers from the perspective of a Vietnam veteran. He won again in 1998 with the thematically related Forever Peace, and now he's back with Forever Free.
Of course, there's no guarantee that Forever Free will win a Hugo. It's well-written, but this book is weird even for Haldeman, who delights in tossing readers curve balls.
Forever Free begins with an almost stereotypical SF premise. It's a sequel to The Forever War, where relativistic starships defined a war fought over centuries by culturally dislocated soldiers. When the war finally ends after a thousand years, humanity, now a communal creature called "Man," exists in harmony with the alien Taurians.
The few remaining baseline humans now live on a reservation, an arctic planet they call "Middle Finger." Many, including William Mandela, the protagonist of Forever War, are veterans of the long struggle. They don't like being under the control of the new Man, and Mandela hatches an audacious plan to hijack an abandoned relativistic starship and time-travel 40,000 years to a hopefully Man-free future.
The first half of the book is a relatively straightforward depiction of how the veterans secure the starship and prepare for the long journey. However, Haldeman throws in some twists that underscore the near impossibility of stealing a starship. There's no Scotty pulling the spark plugs on the Excelsior here!
Instead, while Man quickly becomes aware of Mandela's plan, aspects of the communal intelligence even connive to help pull it off. It's a twist that makes perfect sense from Man's viewpoint (not only does it get rid of some troublemakers, but the humans will make fascinating museum specimens when they return) and emphasizes the humans' lack of freedom. They can't even escape Man without Man's help.
It's not hard to ignore this irony in the book's early chapters. Mandela's plan is appropriately sneaky, allowing Haldeman to provide plenty of entertaining action scenes as the conspirators bluff and smash their way to freedom. It's a well-done ship-swipe, right up there with the theft of the Enterprise in "Star Trek III" or the liberation of New Frontiers in Heinlein's Methuselah's Children.
Once the Starship Time Warp gets underway, Haldeman's story takes a wild swerve toward the unexpected. We've been conditioned by similar books to expect a tale of shipboard life and exciting discoveries on strange new worlds. Instead, the laws of physics go haywire and the crew is forced to abandon ship and return home, where things start getting really strange.
I won't spoil the surprises for you. Let's just say that Haldeman piles improbabilities upon themselves, then highlights them with his characters' practical and realistic responses. There is a consistent explanation for everything, but it may bring some readers' suspension of disbelief crashing down when it's revealed. Haldeman took a big risk in the way he decided to end this book, and I'm not convinced it paid off with a satisfying resolution.
On the other hand, Forever Free's ending lives up to its title. It really is about a journey to freedom, even if it's not the journey you expect. This book may or may not be a complete success -- I'm not sure what Haldeman's point was yet, though I'm enjoying trying to figure it out -- but it is certainly ambitious.
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