This book is a trilogy, but the first 2 books, Forever War (****) and "Forever Free" (***) are related stories with the same characters and continuing storyline. "Forever Peace" (**) is a stand alone story but develops the themes covered in the first 2 books.
I read "Forever War" earlier as a separate publication (see separate review) but this book was clearly the best of the three. "Forever Free" starts off well and looks promising as its develops the themes go human development (clones/shared thinking) and of effective time travel by. crew travelling near light speed away from their home panel and returning some time later , barely aged while the home plates have moved on in time significantly. However the final section of the book is a bit deus et machina and while interesting is a bit of a disappointment - possibly an approach best left as a short story.
"Forever Peace" further explores how sharing of consciousness would effect human society in the environment of a forever war on earth itself. Again, the ending while helping to serve as a vehicle to prompt some thought in the future of human evolution, seems to wrap up a complex and somewhat implausible scenario rather too quickly and neat to allow suspension of belief. ( )

enjoyed the third book most, but all in all they were page-turning, action and plot packed. Interesting but I must be too "humanised" to really like all the soldierboy killings and gore ( )

The Forever War
William Mandella is drafted into fighting for Earth against the alien Taurans near the beginning of a war which lasts for 1143 years due to relativity effects as each side flies through collapsars (wormholes) to gain territory at the other's expense.

Not bad, not good. I don't see why it has received so much acclaim.

Forever Free
William Mandella and other veterans of the Forever War have settled as farmers and fishers on Middle Finger. Tired of life as a gene bank under the supervision of the cloned collective consciousness that is Man they plot to steal a space ship head out as far as possible and then come back, by which time relativity will have let 40,000 years pass.

I enjoyed the set up with descriptions of life on Middle Finger and the mysterious events on the voyage and the veterans' return but the deus ex machina type resolution at the end was disappointing.

Forever Peace
Earth is split into two opposing camps, the Alliance and the Ngumi. Jason Class is a mathematical physicist who has to do National Service for 10 days a month as operator of a mechanical soldier for the Alliance. Working with his lover/colleague Amelia Harding, they realise that an experiment colliding elementary particles put in orbit round Jupiter will re-create the Big Bang, starting a new universe and ending this one. Can the experiment be stopped and can the ultimate weapon be kept out of an apocalyptic group's hands?

Ideas fizz off the page in this one, with lots of excitement in the race against time. However, the switching back and forth between omniscient 3rd person narrator and first person narrative got annoying after a while. ( )

An omnibus edition with the Forever War, Forever Free, and Forever Peace. The first written in the '70s as a look towards post-Vietnam vets and how they were affected by war. Specifically that the world around them continued moving forward while they were "stuck" in war with no real perceived changes (other than war and death). The world that the soldiers return to is never the same one that they left. He tells that story by the time dilation of travelling at near relativistic speeds and thousands of years pass between missions. Eventually the war is over and mankind has moved on to a group mentality that the soldiers can't really identify with. The 2nd book is afterwards as the soldiers try to get comfortable on a "reservation" for non-group minds. They don't want to stay and hijack a space ship to take another relatistic journey to far in the future where mankind has perhaps evolved further or even disappeared. They don't make it - but rather meet something else (no spoilers).
The third book is set at the beginning of the world and deals with the revolution that starts the group mind through "jacks" directly into your brain. I think the first book is classic and strong. The 2nd and 3rd were weaker - but explored themes that the writer wanted to show that were left over from the first. Good stories - but not as original or strong as the first. ( )

The Forever War - 21/02/12
William Mandella is drafted to fight in an interstellar war against the alien Taurans but, due to the effects of relativity, each time he returns from a tour of duty of a few months, centuries have passed on Earth.
Really engrossing – kept wanting to read on (and there are 2 more volumes in the omnibus…)
The happy ending may seem a bit cheap and easy, but Mandella definitely deserved a bit of good luck and the idea of using a shuttle to “time travel” to wait for loved ones is pretty ingenious. Marygay wasn’t the only one on the shuttle, though: how must the others who waited feel when they learn that these are the last survivors (and how would ‘Man’ know that anyway?) and their loved ones didn’t make the many billions to one odds that Mandella and Marygay did to be reunited?

Forever Free - 10/03/12
In this direct sequel to The Forever War, William and Marygay and the other vets living on Middle Finger get fed up of being Man’s genetic insurance policy and try to escape to the future with a relativistic journey on the Time Warp. Something goes wrong and they are forced to return and find that all humans, Man and Taurans have disappeared. Then it goes a bit mad in the last 30 pages or so: they travel to Earth to find that the same has happened there and meet shape-shifting aliens, the Omni, who were always there, hidden, and then they meet “the nameless” – effectively gods who have set up the experiment that is the universe, setting the laws of physics on a whim, just to see what happened…
Another “easy” ending (like Marygay being alive at the end of The Forever War with the war suddenly over), but with a pretty literal deus ex machina as an explanation. An interesting idea – a sudden and mad one in the last few pages of a book, but an interesting one nonetheless.

Forever Peace - 14/03/12
The first ‘sequel’ to The Forever War (in publication order), which appears third in this omnibus as it isn’t a ‘direct’ sequel, unlike Forever Free, but a look at some of the same issues from a different angle.
2043: the first and third worlds are at war with the first world using remotely-operated “soldierboys”. Julian Class, a draftee soldierboy mechanic, and his lover Dr Amelia “Blaze” Harding discover that the Jupiter Project they are working on could destroy the universe but, worse still, there is a faction which wants this to happen.
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