Forever Peace (1997 original; edició 1998)

Would have been a better follow-up than 'Forever Free'. Suffers from scale issues ('we must solve a problem impacting the world' contrasted against 'by putting brain ports in people') where it's hard to focus on the characters being important enough to really have the impact that results. Similar issue to Malka Older's novels. ( )

excellent story ( )

I just reread Forever Peace. It's been several years since I read it originally, and I hoped that my opinion somehow changed regarding the quality of this novel.

I loved The Forever War, it is probably in the top 20 of all science fiction novels ever written. I had high expectations of this novel, considering it was marketed as part of the "Forever Universe". However, as far as I can tell it's not part of that universe at all, and the labeling must somehow be part of a Marketing plan designed to take advantage of the popularity of the Forever War.

The plot of the book is intriguing, how can humanity not wage war.

While the main character is sympathetic and interesting, there are times in the book that Haldeman can't explain through his characters what is occurring and so he resorts to some 3rd person omnipotent narrator that catches us up to whats going on. When this happens its so jarring that you lose the character's perspective and it drops you out of the entire mood of the novel. This catch-up process occurs throughout the book to describe what is happening outside of your characters and it doesn't work. At all. Disappointing.

( )

Awful piece of rubbish. ( )

I really enjoyed this story. As the summary says, "two creatures have wandered the Earth for generations. The aliens have no knowledge of each other...One, the changeling, has survived by adaptation, taking the shapes of many different organisms. The other, the chameleon, has survived solely by destroying anything or anyone that threatens it." I thought the development of the aliens was great - the changeling develops an empathy toward the humans it encounters and sometimes becomes; the chameleon develops into a malevolent being whose favorite human is Josef Mengele.

There are some areas where the book appeared too farfetched - especially the response of one of the main characters to discovering the existence of an alien - but overall the story held my interest and was actually quite a study in human behavior and rituals. ( )