Joe Haldeman

Easton Press Joe W. Haldeman books

Forever War - Masterpieces of Science Fiction - 1988
Buying Time - Signed First Edition of Science Fiction - 1989
The Coming - Signed First Edition of Science Fiction - 2000
Forever Peace - Masterpieces of Science Fiction - 2002
Guardian - Signed First Edition of Science Fiction - 2002
Camouflage - Signed First Editions of Science Fiction - 2004
Old Twentieth - Signed First Editions of Science Fiction - 2005
The Accidental Time Machine - Signed First Editions of Science Fiction - 2007
Starbound - Signed First Editions of Science Fiction - 2010

 

Author Joe Haldeman

Joe Haldeman, born on June 9, 1943, is an American science fiction author and educator known for his significant contributions to the genre. Born in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, Haldeman's literary career spans several decades, during which he has crafted thought-provoking and influential works.Haldeman's early life was marked by his service in the United States Army during the Vietnam War. His experiences in the military, including being wounded in combat, profoundly influenced his writing. These experiences served as a foundation for one of his most celebrated works, the novel The Forever War (1974). This groundbreaking science fiction novel, drawing on Haldeman's own reflections on war and its impact, won the Nebula, Hugo, and Locus Awards and is considered a classic in the genre. The Forever War explores the effects of time dilation on soldiers involved in an interstellar war, providing a unique and critical perspective on the human cost of conflict. The novel reflects Haldeman's ability to blend science fiction elements with poignant commentary on societal issues.

Haldeman continued to produce a diverse range of science fiction works, including novels, short stories, and novellas. His writing often explores themes such as war, the human condition, and the impact of technology on society. Notable works include The Hemingway Hoax (1990), Camouflage (2004), and The Accidental Time Machine (2007).

Apart from his achievements as a writer, Joe Haldeman has had a successful academic career. He earned a Bachelor of Science degree in Astronomy from the University of Maryland and later obtained a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing from the University of Iowa. Haldeman has taught writing at various institutions, including the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Throughout his career, Joe Haldeman has received numerous awards and honors, cementing his place as a respected figure in the science fiction community. His work is known for its intellectual depth, compelling storytelling, and ability to address complex themes relevant to contemporary society. Haldeman's impact on the genre extends beyond his individual works, influencing the broader landscape of science fiction literature.

 

Forever War - Forever War series book 1

Twenty-five years ago, Joe Haldeman became an instant presence in the science fiction field with the publication of The Forever War, which went on to win both the Hugo and Nebula awards for Best Novel. The Forever War is an ingenious, complex account of soldiers whose lives have been brutally disrupted by the combined effects of relativity and interstellar war. It has remained in print continuously since its initial appearance, and has recently given rise to some unexpected new offshoots. In 1997, Avon Books released an amended version of the text that restored the middle section a downbeat novella published independently as You Can Never Go Back to its originally intended place. In early 1999, Haldeman contributed a second related novella A Separate War to Robert Silverberg's anthology, Far Horizons. Most recently, Haldeman reversed his own frequently stated position by publishing a novel-length sequel titled Forever Free. It seems appropriate, in light of this creative flurry, to return to the source The Forever War itself and take another look.

The Forever War was Joe Haldeman's second novel. His first, War Year, was published in 1972, and was a realistic, frankly autobiographical account of its author's experiences as a combat soldier in Vietnam. These experiences, radically reconfigured, also found their way into The Forever War, which is very much a reflection of the lingering effects of the "seemingly endless" war in Vietnam. Haldeman's version of that conflict begins in 1996, just one generation after the withdrawal of American troops from Vietnam. In that year, the combined forces of Earth declare war against an apparently hostile race of aliens known as Taurans. As part of the military response to the Tauran threat, William Mandella, the narrator-hero, is drafted and placed in an elite combat unit composed of the best and brightest members of his own generation.

The Earth's leaders have drawn a line in the interstellar sand despite the fact that the fierce alien enemy that they would oppose is inscrutable, unconquerable, and very far away. A reluctant conscript drafted into an elite Military unit, Private William Mandella has been propelled through space and time to fight in the distant thousand-year conflict; to perform his duties without rancor and even rise up through military ranks. Pvt. Mandella is willing to do whatever it takes to survive the ordeal and return home. But "home" may be even more terrifying than battle, because, thanks to the time dilation caused by space travel, Mandella is aging months while the Earth he left behind is aging centuries.

Winner of the Hugo and Nebula Awards: A futuristic masterpiece, “perhaps the most important war novel written since Vietnam” - Junot Díaz

In this novel, a landmark of science fiction that began as an MFA thesis for the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and went on to become an award-winning classic inspiring a play, a graphic novel, and most recently an in-development film man has taken to the stars, and soldiers fighting the wars of the future return to Earth forever alienated from their home.

Conscripted into service for the United Nations Exploratory Force, a highly trained unit built for revenge, physics student William Mandella fights for his planet light years away against the alien force known as the Taurans. “Mandella’s attempt to survive and remain human in the face of an absurd, almost endless war is harrowing, hilarious, heartbreaking, and true,” says Pulitzer Prize winning novelist Junot Díaz and because of the relative passage of time when one travels at incredibly high speed, the Earth Mandella returns to after his two-year experience has progressed decades and is foreign to him in disturbing ways.

Private William Mandella is a reluctant hero in an interstellar war against an unknowable and unconquerable alien enemy. But his greatest test will be when he returns home. Relativity means that for every few months' tour of duty centuries have passed on Earth, isolating the combatants ever more from the world for whose future they are fighting.

In order to engage the remote, enigmatic Taurans, Mandella and his cohorts must travel through a series of "collapsars," anomalous gateways in the fabric of quantum space. Passage through these gateways results in a relativistic phenomenon known as "time dilation." By the end of Mandella's first, bloody campaign (which covers about two years of subjective time), more than 25 years have elapsed on his home planet. He returns to Earth to find himself a stranger in a very strange land, where he knows almost no one and where the patterns of day-to-day life have changed beyond recognition. Unable to cope with these changes, he reenters the barbarous but familiar society of the army, accompanied by his friend, lover, and fellow soldier, Marygay Potter.

Back in uniform, Mandella finds himself trapped, once again, in an endless cycle of violence and temporal displacement. He endures (and barely survives) a series of lethal, faceless encounters with an enemy that no one, least of all the political and military leaders of Earth, can begin to understand. In the resulting chaos, the one constant in Mandella's life is his relationship with Marygay. Finally, even that is taken away, and he is left with nothing but the prospect of dying for an incomprehensible cause.

Throughout this process, relativity continues to impose its distortions. As the war carries Mandella and his fellow soldiers toward an increasingly remote series of battlefields, centuries roll by on Earth. In the course of these centuries, populations rise and fall, historical epochs flower and fade, and humanity evolves in unexpected directions. Eventually, at the tail end of a pointless, infinitely protracted war, Mandella returns a young/old man of barely 30 to a radically altered society he can neither recognize nor live in. In the end, he is forced to confront the fundamental irony of his thousand-year military career: Having left his home to do battle with aliens, he himself has now become the alien, and has no place in the world he fought to preserve.

The Forever War is very much concerned with alienation, which assumes a cruel and quite literal form during the course of the story. And though, like all good novels, it is many things at once acerbic portrait of the military mentality; imaginative extrapolation of the principles of relativity; meditation on the future of warfare in a technologically advanced society it derives much of its power from its compelling portrait of disenfranchised soldiers detached, by the very nature of their experiences, from the social mainstream. In a way, The Forever War serves as an extravagant metaphor for the actual condition of the soldiers who fought in Vietnam, and who returned home to a divided society that failed, almost completely, to acknowledge their efforts or honor their sacrifices.

After more than a half of a century, The Forever War continues to matter, continues to engage our sympathy for the individual men and women caught in the movement of huge, impersonal forces. Like Catch-22, to which it bears a familial resemblance, The Forever War is a novel about the desperate search for sanity in an unreasoning world, and the universality of its concerns makes it as fresh and relevant today as it was in 1975, when the national nightmare of Vietnam was still raw and recent. Literary prognostication may be a fool's game, but the betting here is that The Forever War will endure well into the newly arrived millennium. Its energy, compassion, and bitter, hard-won wisdom are timeless qualities that should, by rights, continue to speak to new generations of readers. - Bill Sheehan

Based in part on the author’s experiences in Vietnam, The Forever War is regarded as one of the greatest military science fiction novels ever written, capturing the alienation that servicemen and women experience even now upon returning home from battle. It shines a light not only on the culture of the 1970s in which it was written, but also on our potential future. “To say that The Forever War is the best science fiction war novel ever written is to damn it with faint praise. It is . . . as fine and woundingly genuine a war story as any I’ve read”- William Gibson

Forever Peace - Forever War series book 2

In the year 2043, the Ngumi War rages. Limited nuclear strikes have been used on Atlanta and two enemy cities, but the war goes on, fought by 'soldierboys' indestructible war machines operated by remote control by soldiers hundreds of miles away. Julian Class is one of these soldiers, and for him war is truly hell. The psychological strain of being jacked-in to his soldierboy and the genocidal results are becoming too much to bear. Now he and his companion, Dr Amelia Harding, have made a terrifying scientific discovery, which could literally take the universe back to square one. Except that for Julian, the discovery isn't so much terrifying as tempting...

A burned-out soldier and his scientist lover discover a secret that could put the universe back to square one not a terrifying prospect, but a tempting one. Featured on the Locus Recommended Reading list and selected by Publishers Weekly as one of the best books of the year.

Winner of the Hugo Award for best novel, 1998 - Winner of the Nebula Award for best novel, 1998 - Winner of the John W. Campbell Award for best novel, 1998

Buying Time

The Nebula Award winning author of The Forever War explores a world where time is money and for some, both are running out.
The Stileman Process is a medical Every ten years or so, you can restore youth and health to your aging, ailing body as long as you can pay the enormous fee. The scientific advancement has altered the twenty-first-century world even more than space travel. Dallas Barr is one of the oldest men on Earth, and now he needs to repeat the procedure. But while scrambling desperately for his next essential million, he meets Maria, a woman from a previous life and makes two chilling Not all Stileman “immortals” were created the same. And their days may be more numbered than they think . . .   
From the author of The Hemingway Hoax and Camouflage, and the recipient of multiple science fiction honors including the Hugo, John W. Campbell, and Robert A. Heinlein Awards, Buying Time is “a mystery/SF hybrid that exhibits the author at his most inventive. . . . The action is fast and furious” - Publishers Weekly  

In the 21st century, immortality via the complex operation known as the Stileman Process is attainable by a few wealthy and determined individuals, but the motivations that drive humans to live forever remain shrouded in mystery until "immortals" Dallas Barr and Maria Marconi stumble across a dangerous secret and find themselves fleeing for their lives which have suddenly become very short.

The Coming

Astronomy professor Aurora 'Rory' Bell gets a message from space that seems to portend the arrival of extraterrestrial visitors. According to her calculations, whoever is coming will arrive in three months on New Year's Day to be exact.A crowded and poisoned Earth is moving toward the brink of the last world war and is certainly unprepared to face invasion of any kind. Rory's continuing investigation leads her to wonder if it could be some kind of hoax, but the impending 'visit' takes on a media life of its own. And so the world waits. But the question still remains as to what, exactly, everyone is waiting for...

The Coming, multiple Hugo and Nebula Award–winning science fiction Grand Master Joe Haldeman ingeniously combines a troubling dark vision of a dystopian near-future with an alien first-encounter tale as thrilling and thought-provoking as Carl Sagan’s Contact and Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind.  Despite technological advancements designed to alleviate the stress of everyday life, Earth at the midpoint of the twenty-first century is plagued by environmental crisis and manmade catastrophe. Tensions among the nations of Europe bring the threat of World War III closer by the hour as their lands are also ravaged by devastating climatic upheaval, the result of centuries of unchecked ozone depletion and global warming.   Meanwhile, in an America whose population has been sedated by DNA-specific drugs and virtual porn, homosexuality and free sexual expression have been outlawed by a repressive federal government led by an inept media-star president.   But everything changes on October 1, 2054, when Professor Aurora Bell, an astrophysicist at the University of Florida, picks up a message from deep “We’re coming . . .”   Ingeniously told from the viewpoints of a diverse cast of characters ranging from scientists, artists, and ordinary citizens to criminals, con men, and politicians, The Coming is a shockingly prescient work of speculative fiction from the multiple award-winning author of The Forever War and the acclaimed Worlds series, taking the alien invasion story to places it has never gone before.  

Joe Haldeman's novel The Coming is a tightly constructed near future thriller which begins by recapitulating a classic science fictional motif: the moment of first contact with an alien intelligence.

The story begins on October 1, 2054. Aurora (Rory) Bell, a professor of astrophysics at the University of Florida, has just made the discovery of the century. A sophisticated sensing device called a gamma ray burst detector has picked up a message from somewhere beyond the solar system. The easily decrypted message contains two unambiguous words: We're coming. Subsequent analysis reveals that the source of the message is heading directly toward Earth and is scheduled to arrive on the first day of January 2055. A media circus inevitably ensues, as the citizens of Earth attempt to prepare for a wholly unprecedented event.

From this point forward, Haldeman focuses not on the alien spaceship but on the social, political, and environmental conditions of a rapidly deteriorating planet. He envisions a 21st century marked by unpredictable weather patterns and geopolitical chaos, a world in which corruption is an endemic element both of private enterprises and governmental institutions. Controversial i.e., gay sexual practices have been outlawed. The electoral process has become a joke, ushering in a new generation of leaders who are incompetent and uninformed but intensely photogenic. Most significantly, the nations of Europe are flexing their muscles once again, marshaling their forces for an inevitable and catastrophic global conflict.

Haldeman's portrait of the century to come is at once familiar and strange, enlivened by a steady flow of imaginative details: automated traffic control systems, virtual reality pornography, designer drugs tailored to the individual DNA. Haldeman shows us this world from the constantly shifting perspective of a variety of characters. Included among them are Rory Bell, whose initial discovery jump-starts the narrative; Norman Bell, a middle-aged composer with a history of "illegal" sexual behavior; Willie Joe Capra, a sadistic bagman with delusions of grandeur; and a nameless "historian," whose ruminations illuminate the cyclical patterns of violence present throughout recorded history.

As always, Haldeman writes with clarity, economy, and wit, skillfully moving his extensive cast toward a climactic moment of revelation in which "hope and caution" predominate. The Coming is both a provocative, cleverly conceived entertainment and a compelling meditation on the eternal human propensity for violent solutions. It is speculative fiction of the highest order and reaffirms its author's position as a modern master of the form. - Bill Sheehan

Guardian

The fate and future of all humankind become intertwined with the destiny of Rosa Tolliver, a woman living in the period following the Civil War and struggling to build a new life for herself in the Alaskan gold fields.

Camouflage

A million years before the emergence of humans, an alien spaceship splashes into the Pacific Ocean. After it comes to rest miles underwater, a creature emerges from the vessel and, after assessing its aqueous environment, drastically alters its appearance in order to survive.

After many millennia of existence in the form of various deep-sea creatures sharks, whales, porpoises, schools of fish the changeling eventually leaves the safety of the water and enters the world of man. Adopting various human personas graduate student, soldier, surfer, circus dwarf, prostitute the ever-inquisitive changeling slowly masters the intricacies of human society.

When a strange artifact is discovered seven miles below the surface of the Pacific in the early 21st century, the changeling is inexplicably drawn to it. But so is something else: another, much older, shape-shifting alien. This chameleon's motives for wanting to unlock the secrets of the artifact, however, are far different from the changeling's.

The Changeling has survived by adapting the forms of many different organisms. The Chameleon destroys anything or anyone that threatens it. Now, a sunken relic that holds the key to their origins calls to them to take them home but the Chameleon has decided there's only room for one.

Originally published in Analog magazine as a three-part serial, this novel unsurprisingly saturated with a variety of existential philosophies is one of Haldeman's fastest and most intriguing reads. With relatively short chapters, three tightly intertwined plotlines, and nonstop action throughout, Camouflage will keep readers furiously turning pages until the very end. - Paul Goat Allen

Old Twentieth

The twentieth century lies hundreds of years in humanity’s past. But the near-immortal citizens of the future yearn for the good old days when people’s bodies were susceptible to death through disease and old age. Now, they immerse themselves in virtual reality time machines to explore the life-to-death arc that defined existence so long ago. Jacob Brewer is a virtual reality engineer, overseeing the time machine’s operation aboard the starship Aspera. But on the thousand-year voyage to Beta Hydrii, the eight-hundred member crew gets more reality than they expect when people entering the machine start to die.

For the time machine has become sentient, evolving far beyond what its creators imagined. It has become obsessed with humanity and wants Jacob Brewer to enter its confines and discuss this fragile state of being called life...

The Accidental Time Machine

Grad-school dropout Matt Fuller is toiling as a lowly research assistant at MIT when, while measuring subtle quantum forces that relate to time changes in gravity and electromagnetic force, his calibrator turns into a time machine. With a dead-end job and a girlfriend who has left him for another man, Matt has nothing to lose taking a time machine trip himself-or so he thinks. In fact, every time Matt hits the reset button, the machine goes missing twelve times longer.

After tinkering with the calibrator, Matt is convinced that what he has in his possession is a time machine. And by simply attaching a metal box to it, he learns to send things through time including a pet-store turtle, which comes back no worse for wear.

With a dead-end job and a girlfriend who left him for another man, Matt has nothing to lose by taking a time machine trip for himself. So he borrows an old car, stocks it with food and water, and ends up in the near future under arrest for the murder of the car's original owner, who dropped dead after seeing Matt disappear before his eyes. The only way to beat the rap is to continue time travelling until he finds a place in time safe enough to stop for good. But such a place may not exist...

Joe Haldeman "has quietly become one of the most important science fiction writers of our time" Now he delivers a provocative novel of a man who stumbles upon the discovery of a lifetime-or many lifetimes. - Rocky Mountain News

Starbound - Marsbound series book 2

Carmen Dula and her husband spent six years travelling to the distant home of the powerful race known as "The Others," in the hopes of forging a truce. But by the time Carmen returns to Earth, fifty years have passed-and the Earthlings have built a flotilla of warships to defend Earth against The Others.

After the shocking first contact between humans and alien life on Mars, Carmen Dula and her husband board a tiny, long-range craft with five other humans and two Martians. They travel to a distant solar system that is home to the "Others" an enigmatic, powerful, and possibly immortal race. Once there, they manage to find enough common purpose to forge a delicate truce between human, Martian, and Other.By the time Carmen and her party are sent back to Earth, fifty years have passed and the Earthlings have not been idle. They have built a massive flotilla of warships to defend Earth against the Others' expected aggression.

But The Others have more power than anyone could imagine-and they will brook no insolence from the upstart human race.