The Forever War

One of the best novels to come out of the disaster of Vietnam is a science fiction work called The Forever War by Joe Halderman. The story goes that in the future, humanity is at war with an alien race light years away. They recruit genetically superior men and women to make them into super soldiers, putting them through brutal training and outfitting them with the best weapons and tech that Earth can muster. They’re sent out to fight the aliens, which doesn’t go so well, but the meat of the story is what happens when they come back.

The soldiers travel through wormholes to get to the battlefield, and because of a phenomenon in physics known as “time dilation,” when they come back to Earth centuries have passed on their home planet. They travel to the far-off war multiple times, and each time they return Earth is drastically changed. On one return home, the soldiers discover that pretty much everyone on Earth is gay. “Heterosexuality is considered an emotional dysfunction,” Halderman writes. “Relatively easy to cure.” In the words of Sam Hyde, literal State-Enforced Homosexuality.

The primary reasons given for this are overpopulation — a very popular anxiety in the 1970s — and depletion of resources. Which may sound silly, but the idea has some validity in history and nature. Imperial declines throughout history are often accompanied by overpopulation in urban centers along with a rise in acceptance and propagation of homosexuality. And some animal populations also respond to population pressure with a rise in the incidence of homosexuality, especially in pair-bonding species like penguins. On the human side of things, pair that population pressure with the general decadence endemic to civilizational decline, and you get a recipe for a “gayer” society. Fanned by malignant and subversive forces, no doubt, but to some extent it’s likely an instinctual response. Animals know it when they’re squeezed.

Many in the literary commentariat have claimed The Forever War as a liberal rebuke to the right-wing science fiction of authors like Robert Heinlein — war as nuanced tragedy and waste instead of righteous macho bravado. But that doesn’t really hold up today, since it views an antiwar bent within a false prism that sees American war as a right-wing activity. The book is definitely an allegory for the experience of American soldiers returning home from the prolonged conflict in Vietnam, often to a population that had become alien and hostile toward them. But the Vietnam War was started and continued by two left-wing presidents — Kennedy and Johnson — and was brought to an end by Richard Nixon. And the hostile population the veterans returned to was mostly leftist college students and decadent urbanites.

The story itself presents the solders as literal ubermenchen. They all have IQs over 150 and are exceptional physical specimens. Over the centuries of time dilation, these paladins become speciated from the humans that remained on Earth, unique for their whiteness in contrast to a new vaguely browned population, and unable to communicate with current-year people who no longer speak English. In the end, the main character and his female soldier-mate flee the disaster of their homeward to a heterosexual space colony that was created in case the “all-gay, all-brown” plan for humanity didn’t go so great, which of course it didn’t. In today’s poltical frame, this all sounds like something that could have been cooked up on a right-wing 4Chan thread.

What Halderman depicts most profoundly is a widening gyre between vitality and entropy, a chasm surely familiar to some of the more vigorous Baby Boomers who made it through the human paper-shredder of Vietnam. Taking such broad jumps through time allows these future soldiers to see the washing away of their society, their ethnicity, and their history. Strangers in their own land (contra Heinlein), and a source of envy to the dysgenic occupiers of their old civilization.

Perhaps a warning against accelerationism. Do you really want to see the future?