Forever Peace Audiobook By Joe Haldeman cover art

Forever Peace

 Preview

$0.00 for first 30 days

Try for $0.00
Access a growing selection of included Audible Originals, audiobooks, and podcasts.
You will get an email reminder before your trial ends.
Audible Plus auto-renews for $7.95/mo after 30 days. Upgrade or cancel anytime.

Forever Peace

By: Joe Haldeman
Narrated by: George Wilson
Try for $0.00

$7.95 a month after 30 days. Cancel anytime.

Buy for $21.49

Buy for $21.49

Confirm purchase
Pay using card ending in
Switch payment method
By confirming your purchase, you agree to Audible's Conditions of Use, License, and Amazon's Privacy Notice. Taxes where applicable.
Cancel
Drawing on his own war experiences, Vietnam veteran Joe Haldeman creates stunning works of science fiction. Forever Peace is not a sequel to his previous award-winning work, The Forever War, but it deals with similarly provocative issues. When it was published, Forever Peace was chosen as the Best Book of the Year by Publishers Weekly. It also won the coveted Hugo Award.

War in the 21st century is fought by "soldierboys". Remote-controlled mechanical monsters, they are run by human soldiers who hard-wire their brains together to form each unit. Julian is one of these dedicated soldiers, until he inadvertently kills a young boy. Now he struggles to understand how this has changed his mind.

Forever Peace is a riveting portrayal of the effects of collective consciousness, and it offers some tantalizing revelations. Narrator George Wilson's skillful performance weaves together the elements of futuristic technology with the drama of a trained soldier reconciling basic human needs.

©1997 Joe Haldeman (P)2000 Recorded Books Fantasy Fiction Science Fiction War Human Brain

Critic reviews

  • Hugo Award, Best Novel, 1998
  • Nebula Award, Best Novel, 1998

"At once a hard science, military, and political thriller, this book presents a thoughtful and hopeful solution to ending war in the 21st century. Essential for sf collections." (Library Journal)
All stars
Most relevant  
This is not a sequel from the forever war. In this book the author Look into what it is to be human.

It's an interesting departure from forever war.

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
Fantastic blend of Science Fiction and human experience. I will be listening the next book.

Great World Building

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
I'm not sure what the relationship with "Forever War," is. Another view of human and cultural evolution? It is an interesting story, but sometimes the point of view of who was narrating was awkward.

Relationship to the First Book is Confusing

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
Don’t go into this thinking it’s a sequel. It most likely takes place in the same universe. Loved the story though. A lot of hard topics, but worth the read.

Not a sequel!

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
This book is a spiritual, if not narrative, sequel to Haldeman’s 1975 “Forever War”. Both novels won the Hugo & Nebula, and explore the theme of war’s futility, although from different perspectives and in separate story-worlds. Readers expecting a continuation of Forever War’s interstellar conflict or relativistic time dilation effects, will see that instead this story features a strictly terrestrial struggle between the wealthy nations, fueled by effortless nano-factory produced plenty, and the struggling excluded masses. The earlier novel, written in the immediate post-Vietnam days of an antagonistic welcome for returning veterans, further exaggerated the alienation of the protagonist with a fish-out-of-water situation that placed the character hopelessly out of touch with his own century. Here, in the 1998 novel, one senseless war is supplanted by an invisible one to end all wars, as the protagonist discovers a pacification treatment that involves sharing one of the military’s tightest-held tools with all of humanity to bring individuals together into a community incapable of violence outside of self-defense. Haldeman uses SF technology as vehicle to explore the age-old thought that ‘if we only walked in our enemies shoes for a day’. At the same time, the greatest opponent to this peace movement is one of religious zealots who inexplicably seem to want death and destruction for its own sake. I felt that not enough insight was given to their internal motivation, even when the narrative was told in first person perspective of one these characters. This left them a bit too archetypical and cartoon-evil for me. On the human-scale drama of this story, there is a compelling relationship that is shown conquering the challenges of race, age, military-civilian differences, then ‘jacked’ vs natural minds until it is thoroughly proven to be unshakable. There are also some notable thriller scenes and a number of high-tech asymmetric warfare scenes as well. Absent, sadly, are any aliens or Space Opera tropes or any references to advanced climate change expected over the coming century (CliFi).

'Walk a mile in their shoes' Syndrome

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
No complaints with the narration. I actually didn't catch a single mispronounced word. The story itself, however, is just... Lackluster. I've read better world building in high school creative writing classes.

Great reading. Poor storytelling.

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
not bad intellectually. Two much sex!! Skipped half of the book. Would not recommend this.

sub-par for the author.

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
I have always preferred hard SF. Speculative, or Science Fiction. By hard S soft I mean solid, or hard science vs a speculative that magic, or miraculous;having mo rational basis as an explanation.

The pivot of this story has no solid science behind it yet all the major points are believable,even rational.
1.Robot like automatons remotely manipulated by people in remote controlling vertual environments.
The danger faced is a rebooting of the cosmoc"Big Bang. " A rebooting replaces our current universe with a new one without a sound explain of how or what would be doing that. Don't let that keep you away from the story, it's well done, and told.
Not the end of the human world, but of everything of the universe.

Perspective, ways of understanding one's world.

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
Very thought provoking. Makes me wonder what might come out of the stars and galaxies

The ideas

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
I cannot dis a two time Hugo winner. I just expected more.The resolution of our aggresive nature seemed much too simplistic.

To quote Mr Mackey from South Park, " War is Bad."

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
See more reviews