Forever Peace is the second book by Joe Handelman to win both the Hugo and Nebula awards. He also achieved this doubly prestigious honor before with his book The Forever War, which I have previously read and reviewed and greatly enjoyed.Unfortunately, Forever Peace is not as well-written as The Forever War, although it is as inventive. That's part of the problem. There are two great ideas in The Forever War: the notion that some percentage of humans have the ability to be "jacked" so that all sensory input can be shared between two or more people AND the discovery that a long-running astrophysical experiment to recreate the Big Bang will actually destroy a significant portion of our Galaxy and there is a secret society that has infiltrated the Government that believes that it is God's will that the Universe be destroyed.
Either one of these ideas would have been enough to make a pretty decent sciemce fiction novel. However, in Forever Peace I think that Haldeman over-reaches and tries to include two ideas that really don't have much to do with each other. In general, I am a fan of sci-fi books that are brimming with ideas but there's just something ill-posed about the way the ideas in Forever Peace seem to unspool. I was quite surprised, because most reviews seem to think that it is at least as a good as The Forever War but I had difficulty finishing it (and was not really invested in the main character's well-being) which was not the case with The Forever War, which is really a collection of short stories and novellas that feature the same character.
Forever Peace and The Forever War are not really sequels, their similarities are in their author and they both are told from the first-person perspective of a soldier in aseemingly unterminable war. Forever Peace does not distinguish itself in a head-to-head cmparison between the two, but is still worth a try (after reading The Forever War).
OVERALL GRADE: B+.
IMPACT: B-.
IDEAS: A.
WRITING: B.
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