Scanned from FAR HORIZONS (edited by Robert Silverberg) [story 02]

THE FOREVER WAR

JOE HALDEMAN

The Forever War (1974)
1968 (1995) 
Forever Peace (1997)

The Forever War told the story of William Mandella and Marygay Potter, Americans bom in the late twentieth century, who were drafted into an interstellar war that lasted for more than a thousand years. Because of the effect of relativity, they lived through the whole thing.
When they came back to Earth, midway through the book, they found that the culture they had supposedly been protecting had changed so radically that they couldn't live in it-and much as they hated the army, at least it was familiar, so they reenlisted. In the last quarter of the novel, they're separated: forever, they assume. But at the very end the almost impossible happens, and they do find each other again.
People have been after me for a sequel ever since the book came out, and my response always was no, the book is complete. But someday I would write a novella about what happened to the characters later in life.
Kindly editor Silverberg asked that I write that novella for this book, and I started it out with some enthusiasm. But then I saw I actually was writing a novel, the sequel that I said I'd never write. So I warped it around into a novel proposal and sent it out, and then started over, writing a different story for this volume.
The obvious thing missing from The Forever War is the story of what happened to Marygay in the part of the book where she's separated from William. I wrote "A Separate War" to fill in that lacuna, but it also serves as a sort of foreshadowing of the new novel.
SET THEORY
A few years ago I wrote a novel called Forever Peace, and was careful in introducing it to point out that it was not a sequel to The Forever War, though it did cover some of the same ground, from the viewpoint of the same author, more than twenty years later.
The critic Gary Wolfe noted that those two books combined with my "mainstream" novel 1968 to form a kind of triptych about love and war. That was a neat, elegant idea, and here I go kicking it out of shape by writing another novel. I don't think they let you write or paint quartyches.
I had an inkling that a sequel was necessary, though, back when I first sold the paperback rights to The Forever War. The editor said she never would have bought it if the book hadn't had a happy ending.
If ever there was a time and place to keep your mouth shut, that was one of them, but that was in another country, and besides the editor is dead. The Forever War does not have a happy ending. Marygay and William do get back together-the book ends with the birth announcement of their first child-but they're together on a prison planet, preserved as genetic curiosities in a universe where the human race has abandoned its humanity in a monstrous liaison with its former enemy.
In the sequel, Forever Free, they decide to do something about it. Or die trying.
-Joe Haldeman