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Marsbound #3
Earthbound
The Others disposed of Earth’s spaceship fleet as easily as swatting a fly. They blew up the Moon, letting the resulting cloud of rocks and gravel go into orbit. Then, for good measure, they turned off all the power, leaving Earth with nine billion hungry people competing for dwindling resources.
Now Carmen Dula, the first human to encounter Martians and then the mysterious alien Others, and her colleagues struggle to find a way—using nineteenth-century technology—to reclaim the future that has been stolen from them.
Now Carmen Dula, the first human to encounter Martians and then the mysterious alien Others, and her colleagues struggle to find a way—using nineteenth-century technology—to reclaim the future that has been stolen from them.
258 pages, Mass Market Paperback
First published December 6, 2011
39 people are currently reading
634 people want to read
About the author
Joe Haldeman
443 books2,214 followersBrother of Jack C. Haldeman II
Haldeman is the author of 20 novels and five collections. The Forever War won the Nebula, Hugo and Ditmar Awards for best science fiction novel in 1975. Other notable titles include Camouflage, The Accidental Time Machine and Marsbound as well as the short works "Graves," "Tricentennial" and "The Hemingway Hoax." Starbound is scheduled for a January release. SFWA president Russell Davis called Haldeman "an extraordinarily talented writer, a respected teacher and mentor in our community, and a good friend."
Haldeman officially received the Damon Knight Memorial Grand Master for 2010 by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America at the Nebula Awards Weekend in May, 2010 in Hollywood, Fla.
Haldeman is the author of 20 novels and five collections. The Forever War won the Nebula, Hugo and Ditmar Awards for best science fiction novel in 1975. Other notable titles include Camouflage, The Accidental Time Machine and Marsbound as well as the short works "Graves," "Tricentennial" and "The Hemingway Hoax." Starbound is scheduled for a January release. SFWA president Russell Davis called Haldeman "an extraordinarily talented writer, a respected teacher and mentor in our community, and a good friend."
Haldeman officially received the Damon Knight Memorial Grand Master for 2010 by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America at the Nebula Awards Weekend in May, 2010 in Hollywood, Fla.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 101 reviews
April 4, 2021
This winds up the trilogy begun in Marsbound and continued in Starbound. It didn't strike me as being as clear of a narrative as the earlier books, and Haldeman seemed to be throwing in all of his notes and notions... most of which were interesting, but didn't add to the clarity of the theme. It has some thought-provoking parts, but none of the characters were particularly memorable and likable.
March 10, 2017
Conclusion of Joe Haldeman's trilogy that began with Marsbound. The trajectory of this series is surprising, in that with the first volume we begin with a fairly standard, high-optimism first contact story revolving around a teenager whose family moves to the Mars colony and becomes the focus of humanity's first encounter with aliens. The second volume chronicles the expedition mounted to go to the home system of The Others, ancient and incomprehensible nonhumans who maintain powers and abilities close to godhood and who hold the future of humankind in their grasp.
Earthbound is the departure from the expected. At the end of Starbound, The Others have determined that humanity is too great a potential threat to their longterm survival---and by longterm, this means millennia, even eons---and in what seems an arbitrary fit of paranoia not only destroy the moon and creating a vast minefield to prevent spaceflight but then remove the ability to generate electricity from the Earth, sending civilization crashing down in less than a month into subsistence barbarity.
What began as a fairly traditional SFnal yarn now becomes a grim study of probabilities in reality. What would happen if we encountered a vastly superior alien race? What might be the outcome of our insistent assertion of our "right" to explore and expand in the face of presumed limitless material power wielded by minds impossible to comprehend? Haldeman sensibly keep the story focused on Carmen, the Mars Girl, who has narrated the series from the beginning. This third volume becomes, therefore, antidote to the hapless optimism of Star Trek and guileless tales of human pluck and cleverness, a treatise on outcomes just as likely and much harsher than we've come to find comfortable. Humanity doesn't "win" here, unless simple survival regardless of condition is considered a win. The Others seem both implacable and fickle. Hope is all but crushed, and it would seem the only point to the novel is to catalogue the inevitability of failure on such a scale.
But Carmen survives and concludes her story with hints of different kinds of success. This book has been getting considerable negative reviews, precisely because, I think, it is such a downer. But I think the whole series is a sharp critique of the thoughtless naivete embraced by so much science fiction about how resourceful and ultimately dominant humanity is. A bucket of cold water in a way, a wake up to get some perspective. It is useful to be reminded sometimes that some things just can't be "fixed" and allow triumph, at least not in the way we might like.
Earthbound is the departure from the expected. At the end of Starbound, The Others have determined that humanity is too great a potential threat to their longterm survival---and by longterm, this means millennia, even eons---and in what seems an arbitrary fit of paranoia not only destroy the moon and creating a vast minefield to prevent spaceflight but then remove the ability to generate electricity from the Earth, sending civilization crashing down in less than a month into subsistence barbarity.
What began as a fairly traditional SFnal yarn now becomes a grim study of probabilities in reality. What would happen if we encountered a vastly superior alien race? What might be the outcome of our insistent assertion of our "right" to explore and expand in the face of presumed limitless material power wielded by minds impossible to comprehend? Haldeman sensibly keep the story focused on Carmen, the Mars Girl, who has narrated the series from the beginning. This third volume becomes, therefore, antidote to the hapless optimism of Star Trek and guileless tales of human pluck and cleverness, a treatise on outcomes just as likely and much harsher than we've come to find comfortable. Humanity doesn't "win" here, unless simple survival regardless of condition is considered a win. The Others seem both implacable and fickle. Hope is all but crushed, and it would seem the only point to the novel is to catalogue the inevitability of failure on such a scale.
But Carmen survives and concludes her story with hints of different kinds of success. This book has been getting considerable negative reviews, precisely because, I think, it is such a downer. But I think the whole series is a sharp critique of the thoughtless naivete embraced by so much science fiction about how resourceful and ultimately dominant humanity is. A bucket of cold water in a way, a wake up to get some perspective. It is useful to be reminded sometimes that some things just can't be "fixed" and allow triumph, at least not in the way we might like.
December 29, 2011
Earthbound really seems like a book that was required to round out a "trilogy".
Marsbound and Starbound were both fun titles with lots of ideas. Earthbound is a collection of "and then this happened, then that happened, and finally this happened", without any greater ideas or revelations.
Marsbound and Starbound were both fun titles with lots of ideas. Earthbound is a collection of "and then this happened, then that happened, and finally this happened", without any greater ideas or revelations.
March 8, 2012
I really thought that going into this having read the negative reviews that my lowered expectations would allow me to be more accepting of the flaws. No. This book should never have been written. It feels like a fulfillment of a contractual obligation without any real story to fill the pages. This was so immensely stupid that I'm actually a bit annoyed that once again my need to know how things end has overwhelmed my better instincts.
This is like a scifi horror movie that exists just to show off the worst of humanity (without showing any humanity at all) and the numerous ways you can kill people off for no reason whatsoever. I want my time back.
Haldeman doesn't understand women or people in general. Throughout this series the relationships only make sense if you assume all the characters are having their hormones and brain functions regulated by a computer. Their interactions most of the time are cold, excessively rational and the flexibility of their sexual relationships is in complete ignorance of the fact that this is one area in which humans are almost never rational and in which rationality is often an indication of underlying issues.
This is like a scifi horror movie that exists just to show off the worst of humanity (without showing any humanity at all) and the numerous ways you can kill people off for no reason whatsoever. I want my time back.
Haldeman doesn't understand women or people in general. Throughout this series the relationships only make sense if you assume all the characters are having their hormones and brain functions regulated by a computer. Their interactions most of the time are cold, excessively rational and the flexibility of their sexual relationships is in complete ignorance of the fact that this is one area in which humans are almost never rational and in which rationality is often an indication of underlying issues.
June 9, 2023
This is an ugly book.
Part of the ugliness is structural. Earthbound doesn't really have a plot. Characters move from point A to point B and so on until the book ends. Characterization is sparse. Unattributed dialogue fills the pages, and it's hard to tell who's speaking. But then, it doesn't really matter because the characters all sound the same. Descriptions of people, places, and things are very minimal- to the point that it was difficult to picture where things were happening, and what tools were being used. The end result is that Earthbound feels like an ugly, unfinished work.
Another source of ugliness is the repeated, pointless violence. Earthbound is the third of a series. The first, Marsbound set up a first contact scenario. Humans encountered Martians, which set in motion a series of tests created by the Others- a transcendent Alien intelligence that created the Martians. The second, Starbound, continues the plot, where humans send a team to encounter the Others on their home planet. In this, the third and final novel, humans fight each other. Seriously. That's the whole "plot." The Others turn off all electric power on Earth, and humans immediately start killing each other.
As I said above, the characters move from point to point to point, encountering violence at each stop. People die horrifically. The narrator is scarred, emotionally and physically. Then the book ends.
There are some bizarre moments where the Others send a super-powered observer to intervene. This intervention requires gory violence, of course. Then the observer plays existential word games with the survivors and disappears.
I enjoy grim and dark works. I loved Martin's Game of Thrones. I enjoyed Bakker's Second Apocalypse. But both of those have plots, and the violence means something in context.
There's no meaning in this novel that I can see. If you're going to read Haldeman, start with The Forever War and forget this book.
Part of the ugliness is structural. Earthbound doesn't really have a plot. Characters move from point A to point B and so on until the book ends. Characterization is sparse. Unattributed dialogue fills the pages, and it's hard to tell who's speaking. But then, it doesn't really matter because the characters all sound the same. Descriptions of people, places, and things are very minimal- to the point that it was difficult to picture where things were happening, and what tools were being used. The end result is that Earthbound feels like an ugly, unfinished work.
Another source of ugliness is the repeated, pointless violence. Earthbound is the third of a series. The first, Marsbound set up a first contact scenario. Humans encountered Martians, which set in motion a series of tests created by the Others- a transcendent Alien intelligence that created the Martians. The second, Starbound, continues the plot, where humans send a team to encounter the Others on their home planet. In this, the third and final novel, humans fight each other. Seriously. That's the whole "plot." The Others turn off all electric power on Earth, and humans immediately start killing each other.
As I said above, the characters move from point to point to point, encountering violence at each stop. People die horrifically. The narrator is scarred, emotionally and physically. Then the book ends.
There are some bizarre moments where the Others send a super-powered observer to intervene. This intervention requires gory violence, of course. Then the observer plays existential word games with the survivors and disappears.
I enjoy grim and dark works. I loved Martin's Game of Thrones. I enjoyed Bakker's Second Apocalypse. But both of those have plots, and the violence means something in context.
There's no meaning in this novel that I can see. If you're going to read Haldeman, start with The Forever War and forget this book.
January 13, 2015
Haldeman seems completely lost here, and when when he hits 250 pages he whips out his own deus ex machina and delivers salvation to the main character and the book just, inexplicably, ENDS. Which is probably for the best.
A disappointing end to a disappointing trilogy. This book meanders with no real plot, just a sequence of random survival events as the characters try to deal with Earth being sent back to the stone age after their never ending source of power is suddenly turned off by the Others. The entire trilogy hinges on the Others and their fascination with humanity, but he never offers to explain anything about why this race who wants to control and/or destroy us. (sigh) I always look forward to Haldeman's new books, but if this trilogy is any indication of future output I will probably be looking at his future works with a more skeptical eye.
A disappointing end to a disappointing trilogy. This book meanders with no real plot, just a sequence of random survival events as the characters try to deal with Earth being sent back to the stone age after their never ending source of power is suddenly turned off by the Others. The entire trilogy hinges on the Others and their fascination with humanity, but he never offers to explain anything about why this race who wants to control and/or destroy us. (sigh) I always look forward to Haldeman's new books, but if this trilogy is any indication of future output I will probably be looking at his future works with a more skeptical eye.
April 24, 2013
My Take
A very enjoyable read - third in a series by Joe Haldeman that proposes one possible answer to the age-old question "Are we alone in the universe?". The answer is no, and that we are to the "Others" as the ant is to a human.
In this novel, we come fresh from the meeting with "the Others" and see how little we have impressed them. As a matter of fact, they have crushed the moon and taken away all power/electricity/energy from the earth, two things that will definitely keep us earth-bound.
Review #1
Clark Hallman from Good Reads
With Earthbound (a Marsbound Novel), Joe Haldeman, the Hugo and Nebula award-winning author, wraps up his fascinating three-book story that began with Marsbound and continued with Starbound. Carmen Dula, who voyaged to Mars with her family in Marsbound and discovered Martians is the main character, and first person narrator, of Earthbound. She and her husband, whom she met on Mars, are back on Earth after they had voyaged to a distant star system in Starbound to try to negotiate a truce with a strange and powerful race known as “The Others” who’s anger toward the human race in Marsbound had some very serious consequences on Earth. Namir a soldier and some others, including one Martian, who also made the trip to negotiate with “The Others” are back on Earth with Carmen, in this novel. Unfortunately, the negotiations did not go well and the people of Earth had angered “The Others” by building a fleet of warships to try to protect Earth from the aliens. “The Others” punish the population of Earth severely and Earthbound enables the reader to see the tragic consequences of angering “The Others”. The wrath of “The Others” creates global chaos and extreme hardship on Earth. Carmen and her group of space diplomats are caught in the violence created by frightened and desperate people trying to cope with the conditions imposed by “The Others”. It is a grim but interesting book that provides some closure for many of the characters, although not a desirable closure for some of them. Haldeman also displays his ability to depict the brutality and desperation of people fighting for their lives, which he has done very adeptly since he published The Forever War (1974). I am a big fan of Joe Haldeman’s work, and I have read (and own) 24 of his novels. In my opinion, Earthbound did not provide a very satisfactory resolution of the three-book story. It wasn’t a bad read, but it wasn’t consistent with the author’s usual standards. However, it is an interesting read and I certainly recommend this book to everyone who enjoyed Marsbound and Starbound.
Review #2
Russell Letson reviews Joe Haldeman
With Earthbound, Joe Haldeman completes a sequence begun with Marsbound and Starbound. Last year, I called Starbound ‘‘a complete there-and-back-again narrative,’’ and in Earthbound the ‘‘back’’ part kicks in with, if not a vengeance, then at least a very stern warning. The warning is not the first, though explaining that requires a ‘‘Previously in the Marsbound series’’ opening montage. The first book detailed how humans met aliens on Mars who turned out to be not native Martians, but creatures created tens of thousands of years ago by the inscrutable, incredibly powerful Others for the purpose of keeping track of us if and when we achieved spaceflight. Warning Number One came when the planet-scouring bomb they devised to eliminate us dangerous pests didn’t scour the Earth as intended. Warning Two came in Starbound as a result of the first-ever interstellar expedition, sent to confront the Others in their presumed home system of Wolf 25, where new levels of inscrutability and power were revealed. Warning Three was a suggestion that we curtail all space-travel, delivered by pulverizing the moon into a spacecraft-proof rubble cloud. And when clueless Earth politicians chose to ignore that suggestion, Warning Four set the scene for this volume: the Others disabled (or, to be precise, redirected) all electrical power on the planet, effectively putting an end to technological civilization. Take that, nasty monkeys. And don’t make us have to come down there again.
The through-line character and primary narrator of the series is Carmen Dula, who starts off as a bolshy, adventurous teenager and matures into a thoughtful, resourceful, but still human-scale hero. Most of the rest of the core cast comes from the extended, multi-species family/tribe that made up the long Wolf 25 expedition: her husband Paul; her five other human companions, including a trio-marriage of military-intelligence agents; and the pseudo-Martian Snowbird. Earthbound picks up immediately at the cliff-hanger finale of Starbound, with the returned explorers wondering how Snowbird can survive on Earth without her own food and how the humans can survive at all in the short term before confronting the long-term realities of the crash of civilization.
The immediate problem comes from the persistence of the yahoo element of humanity. When the lights (and everything else, from aircraft to phones to snack machines to wristwatches) go out, the first response is gunfire, and that sets the tone for the rest of the book: with seven billion people facing starvation, the guys with the guns will call the shots. Fortunately, Carmen’s group includes four people with military training, especially the ferociously able (and genocide-haunted) ex-Mossad Namir Zahari, so they are not helpless. On the other hand, as the bumper sticker reminds us, shit happens, and Haldeman is not afraid to have it happen to his characters, especially when there is so much of it to go around – so even though they survive their first encounter with the armed and stupid, not every such meeting ends well.
This is part of the relentless procedural and operational realism that marks all of Haldeman’s work, and it means that where earlier volumes anatomized interplanetary travel and pioneering, alien encounters, starship life, or domestic polyamory, this one is almost entirely focused on getting through the early stages of total social-system breakdown. The author does give his protagonists some good cards to play: in addition to military and medical savvy, they also have a possible connection with a sustainable-technology commune (if they can get there) and eventually a channel to the Others in the form of the sporadic presence of the human-looking creature they call Spy, who was created as a kind of interface for whatever Otherly systems are dealing with humanity.
Even Spy can’t explain exactly what its operators will do or why, so the breakdown of civilization gets interrupted by a number of apparently arbitrary events, starting with the power coming back on for long enough to allow Carmen’s group to solve some immediate problems and move around the country a bit: to visit the seat of what is left of government in Washington and leave in something close to disgust; to find the commune; to leave the commune – before winding up in a situation not unlike the one at the book’s beginning. Along the way, they encounter various modes of coping, some of which result in mutual aid, while others require exchanges of gunfire and thus a steady reduction in the numbers of the star-traveler party and whatever allies they acquire. What is heartbreaking about the pockets of rationality and community spirit they find is that they are surrounded by seas of understandable desperation or outright viciousness, generally outgunned, and thus probably doomed. The resolution to this unhappy situation will remind experienced readers of certain other Haldeman novels, copies of which I will leave behind the Spoiler Curtain. You’ll recognize the pattern when you get to the end.
This tour of an unraveling society puts Earthbound squarely in the tradition of postapocalyptic novels, a tradition that seems to be having a mini-revival lately in work by John Barnes (Directive 51, Daybreak Zero) and Stephen Gould (7th Sigma). The current variations examine what happens when you pull one or two essential pieces out of the interlocking stacks that make up our civilization – plastics or petroleum or metals or electricity. One wonders, why these nightmares now? Is it just a turn of the story-generating machinery, or are these bad dreams being triggered by events in our waking lives? The accompanying, enabling motif, with deep roots in SF tradition, is that of the Others, powerful and hostile aliens whose literary ancestors include Wells’s Martians and whose modern cousins include John Varley’s Outsiders, both of whom (which?) are mysterious but not arbitrarily monstrous – they are merely Others with agendas and viewpoints that remain minimally intelligible to the monkey-folk whose lives they disrupt. As tempting as it is to see the Others as personifications of the hostile universe-at-large, that is not a symbolic gesture Haldeman seems much interested in, though there are several comparisons of humankind to lab animals who may or may not have their cages sterilized at the end of the investigation. Instead, their perhaps-capricious, perhaps-Otherly-rational treatment of our unruly species serves as an occasion to examine how much baggage we drag around with us, no matter how far into the future or out into the universe we travel.
A very enjoyable read - third in a series by Joe Haldeman that proposes one possible answer to the age-old question "Are we alone in the universe?". The answer is no, and that we are to the "Others" as the ant is to a human.
In this novel, we come fresh from the meeting with "the Others" and see how little we have impressed them. As a matter of fact, they have crushed the moon and taken away all power/electricity/energy from the earth, two things that will definitely keep us earth-bound.
Review #1
Clark Hallman from Good Reads
With Earthbound (a Marsbound Novel), Joe Haldeman, the Hugo and Nebula award-winning author, wraps up his fascinating three-book story that began with Marsbound and continued with Starbound. Carmen Dula, who voyaged to Mars with her family in Marsbound and discovered Martians is the main character, and first person narrator, of Earthbound. She and her husband, whom she met on Mars, are back on Earth after they had voyaged to a distant star system in Starbound to try to negotiate a truce with a strange and powerful race known as “The Others” who’s anger toward the human race in Marsbound had some very serious consequences on Earth. Namir a soldier and some others, including one Martian, who also made the trip to negotiate with “The Others” are back on Earth with Carmen, in this novel. Unfortunately, the negotiations did not go well and the people of Earth had angered “The Others” by building a fleet of warships to try to protect Earth from the aliens. “The Others” punish the population of Earth severely and Earthbound enables the reader to see the tragic consequences of angering “The Others”. The wrath of “The Others” creates global chaos and extreme hardship on Earth. Carmen and her group of space diplomats are caught in the violence created by frightened and desperate people trying to cope with the conditions imposed by “The Others”. It is a grim but interesting book that provides some closure for many of the characters, although not a desirable closure for some of them. Haldeman also displays his ability to depict the brutality and desperation of people fighting for their lives, which he has done very adeptly since he published The Forever War (1974). I am a big fan of Joe Haldeman’s work, and I have read (and own) 24 of his novels. In my opinion, Earthbound did not provide a very satisfactory resolution of the three-book story. It wasn’t a bad read, but it wasn’t consistent with the author’s usual standards. However, it is an interesting read and I certainly recommend this book to everyone who enjoyed Marsbound and Starbound.
Review #2
Russell Letson reviews Joe Haldeman
With Earthbound, Joe Haldeman completes a sequence begun with Marsbound and Starbound. Last year, I called Starbound ‘‘a complete there-and-back-again narrative,’’ and in Earthbound the ‘‘back’’ part kicks in with, if not a vengeance, then at least a very stern warning. The warning is not the first, though explaining that requires a ‘‘Previously in the Marsbound series’’ opening montage. The first book detailed how humans met aliens on Mars who turned out to be not native Martians, but creatures created tens of thousands of years ago by the inscrutable, incredibly powerful Others for the purpose of keeping track of us if and when we achieved spaceflight. Warning Number One came when the planet-scouring bomb they devised to eliminate us dangerous pests didn’t scour the Earth as intended. Warning Two came in Starbound as a result of the first-ever interstellar expedition, sent to confront the Others in their presumed home system of Wolf 25, where new levels of inscrutability and power were revealed. Warning Three was a suggestion that we curtail all space-travel, delivered by pulverizing the moon into a spacecraft-proof rubble cloud. And when clueless Earth politicians chose to ignore that suggestion, Warning Four set the scene for this volume: the Others disabled (or, to be precise, redirected) all electrical power on the planet, effectively putting an end to technological civilization. Take that, nasty monkeys. And don’t make us have to come down there again.
The through-line character and primary narrator of the series is Carmen Dula, who starts off as a bolshy, adventurous teenager and matures into a thoughtful, resourceful, but still human-scale hero. Most of the rest of the core cast comes from the extended, multi-species family/tribe that made up the long Wolf 25 expedition: her husband Paul; her five other human companions, including a trio-marriage of military-intelligence agents; and the pseudo-Martian Snowbird. Earthbound picks up immediately at the cliff-hanger finale of Starbound, with the returned explorers wondering how Snowbird can survive on Earth without her own food and how the humans can survive at all in the short term before confronting the long-term realities of the crash of civilization.
The immediate problem comes from the persistence of the yahoo element of humanity. When the lights (and everything else, from aircraft to phones to snack machines to wristwatches) go out, the first response is gunfire, and that sets the tone for the rest of the book: with seven billion people facing starvation, the guys with the guns will call the shots. Fortunately, Carmen’s group includes four people with military training, especially the ferociously able (and genocide-haunted) ex-Mossad Namir Zahari, so they are not helpless. On the other hand, as the bumper sticker reminds us, shit happens, and Haldeman is not afraid to have it happen to his characters, especially when there is so much of it to go around – so even though they survive their first encounter with the armed and stupid, not every such meeting ends well.
This is part of the relentless procedural and operational realism that marks all of Haldeman’s work, and it means that where earlier volumes anatomized interplanetary travel and pioneering, alien encounters, starship life, or domestic polyamory, this one is almost entirely focused on getting through the early stages of total social-system breakdown. The author does give his protagonists some good cards to play: in addition to military and medical savvy, they also have a possible connection with a sustainable-technology commune (if they can get there) and eventually a channel to the Others in the form of the sporadic presence of the human-looking creature they call Spy, who was created as a kind of interface for whatever Otherly systems are dealing with humanity.
Even Spy can’t explain exactly what its operators will do or why, so the breakdown of civilization gets interrupted by a number of apparently arbitrary events, starting with the power coming back on for long enough to allow Carmen’s group to solve some immediate problems and move around the country a bit: to visit the seat of what is left of government in Washington and leave in something close to disgust; to find the commune; to leave the commune – before winding up in a situation not unlike the one at the book’s beginning. Along the way, they encounter various modes of coping, some of which result in mutual aid, while others require exchanges of gunfire and thus a steady reduction in the numbers of the star-traveler party and whatever allies they acquire. What is heartbreaking about the pockets of rationality and community spirit they find is that they are surrounded by seas of understandable desperation or outright viciousness, generally outgunned, and thus probably doomed. The resolution to this unhappy situation will remind experienced readers of certain other Haldeman novels, copies of which I will leave behind the Spoiler Curtain. You’ll recognize the pattern when you get to the end.
This tour of an unraveling society puts Earthbound squarely in the tradition of postapocalyptic novels, a tradition that seems to be having a mini-revival lately in work by John Barnes (Directive 51, Daybreak Zero) and Stephen Gould (7th Sigma). The current variations examine what happens when you pull one or two essential pieces out of the interlocking stacks that make up our civilization – plastics or petroleum or metals or electricity. One wonders, why these nightmares now? Is it just a turn of the story-generating machinery, or are these bad dreams being triggered by events in our waking lives? The accompanying, enabling motif, with deep roots in SF tradition, is that of the Others, powerful and hostile aliens whose literary ancestors include Wells’s Martians and whose modern cousins include John Varley’s Outsiders, both of whom (which?) are mysterious but not arbitrarily monstrous – they are merely Others with agendas and viewpoints that remain minimally intelligible to the monkey-folk whose lives they disrupt. As tempting as it is to see the Others as personifications of the hostile universe-at-large, that is not a symbolic gesture Haldeman seems much interested in, though there are several comparisons of humankind to lab animals who may or may not have their cages sterilized at the end of the investigation. Instead, their perhaps-capricious, perhaps-Otherly-rational treatment of our unruly species serves as an occasion to examine how much baggage we drag around with us, no matter how far into the future or out into the universe we travel.
November 11, 2025
Sometimes, being generic isn't a terrible thing.
Don't get me wrong - I don't usually like reading generic things. I crave originality in my fiction. But in *Earthbound*'s case, being more of a cookie-cutter apocalypse novel made it more bearable than its hard-to-stomach predecessors, which were mostly characterized by a whiny teenage narrator or polyamorous relations in space on the way to meat mysterious and uninteresting aliens. In comparison to that, just about anything will be hard hitting, and while *Earthbound* offers nothing to the average (or any) SF reader, it annoyed me less. This whole trilogy has still been a complete fall from grace compared to Haldeman's benchmark work *The Forever War* and even if its sometimes-shoddy-sequels, but apparently, it could be worse...
*Earthbound* picks up right where *Starbound* left off, with Carmen, Namir, Paul, and the other expeditions members on the beach as the Others shut off all electricity on Earth in order to punish humanity for trying to squeeze their way past the cage of space debris they tried to enclose Earth in. The group is left with three problems: finding food for all the humans, keeping them alive in a land where guns will certainly rule, and keeping Snowbird (the group's lone Martian) alive without a decent supply of Martian-edible food. They end up camping in a nearby cabin after having an encounter or two with ex-military bullies and meet up with an ex-security woman when the Others announce to the whole world (through Spy) that they're going to allow electricity for a week to "see what happens." With this, they're able to commandeer a plane for Paul to pilot to the shelter where the POTUS is hiding; they actually divert their course to Russia in order to drop Snowbird off at a base that has resources to keep Martians alive, and *then* they take the plane to the shelter to find that the government is trying to figure out how to task regional leaders with keeping their communities alive and in conversation with each other. But of course, there are hostile factions who seek to derail proceedings and kill the President - who the crew isn't even that impressed with anyways. Looking to save themselves and deal with someone who's not a man-baby, they steal the plane again and fly off to the commune that Dustin, the place where Namir's "co-husband"'s grew up.
They're forced to land ...
If you've read a post-apocalyptic novel before - or watched a generic movie or TV show - you know the beats of society losing its structure and turning into one big ol' gunfight. *Earthbound* is no exception, and the concept behind the Others disabling all electricity on the planet isn't hugely original; it's like a big ol' EMP pulse went through the whole world. The extraterrestrial framing could be interesting and gives Haldeman an excuse to remove his boot from humanity's neck and give them a shot of proving themselves to the Others. Of course, that doesn't happen, although the aliens' motivations behind what is good and what is not is kind of murky throughout the whole ordeal. That's kind of the point, but the point is moot, and even the flavoring of the Others lording over humanity is less present in the book than past installments. There's less of any flavor going on here, with less weird polyamorous crap and none of the distinctive (if not annoying) first-person embellishment as *Marsbound*. I saw one reviewer say that this book and its lack of whining showed real progression and interesting character work for Carmen Dula, but I would've found it hard to distinguish her from any other female character if she hadn't held the perspective, as seen by how all the men seemed to speak about the same - the dialogue was not rich. I suppose that Namir was still the most interesting character in the book (as he was in *Starbound*), but even he feels less cool and layered than he did before.
Of course, the flat veneer has pros and cons; the things that annoyed me aren't so problematic anymore. But there did seem to be some disconnect between what the story wanted to be and what it actually was; the back of the book describes this as Carmen and co's fight with the Others to take back humanity's place, but there's no reclaiming going on here, and the ending seems like a total copout; the actual plot device is as lazy as it is heartwarming, and Haldeman never explains if . Haldeman never bothers to explain anything about the Others, which could've bene okay if the actual story and its thematic texturing were more lush, but Haldeman skips anything that would make the story actually worth my time. So, as usual, I didn't care. So what if this book didn't complete any satisfactory thematic throughline from *Marsbound* and *Starbound* and managed to feel completely hopeless for all the characters involved? So what if it left any potentially question about humanity completely unanswerable? If it seemed like Haldeman had some sort of artful reason to hold back any thematic satisfaction towards the Others' relationship to humanity besides "they're so powerful we can't understand them," maybe I could've mustered up a crap or two to give, but as *Earthbound* stands, I can't find a reason to care.
To make the matter really unpalatable, the prose is flat and not becoming of someone who teaches college kids to write. It just doesn't hold the weight of his big novels like *The Forever War*, which were imaginative and structurally sound. But *Earthbound* just takes a storyline from a poor direct-to-DVD movie about some globally-impacting EMP pules and unsuccessfully graft it onto an already established world of all-powerful aliens. Its plot and aims seem even more all over the place than *Marsbound* or *Starbound*, and without expounding on anything set up to make the series as a whole seem worth your time.
But I'm starting to think this review is going all over the place, so I think it's time to end it and give Haldeman my decree. This book is kind of a poor ending, but it was also the least irritating of the three short novels to read; that's the benefit of being so bare bones. To differentiate this one from the other two I'm going to give it a 5.5/10, but that's not a good rating; it shows that this book is kinda poor. I'll be careful reading Haldeman in the future; *All My Sins Remembered* and *Mindbridge* are big 70s works that I have to read, and I really like time travel so I'll give *The Accidental Time Machine* a shot, but I don't think most of his 2000s work is worth your time. Read the vintage stuff and stay enthralled by Haldeman; here's hoping I can get back into the SF-reading groove one of these days and give you guys a super excited review. Fingers crossed; till then, thanks for reading my reports on my own reading, and I'll hope to see you around Goodreads for some better reads...
Don't get me wrong - I don't usually like reading generic things. I crave originality in my fiction. But in *Earthbound*'s case, being more of a cookie-cutter apocalypse novel made it more bearable than its hard-to-stomach predecessors, which were mostly characterized by a whiny teenage narrator or polyamorous relations in space on the way to meat mysterious and uninteresting aliens. In comparison to that, just about anything will be hard hitting, and while *Earthbound* offers nothing to the average (or any) SF reader, it annoyed me less. This whole trilogy has still been a complete fall from grace compared to Haldeman's benchmark work *The Forever War* and even if its sometimes-shoddy-sequels, but apparently, it could be worse...
*Earthbound* picks up right where *Starbound* left off, with Carmen, Namir, Paul, and the other expeditions members on the beach as the Others shut off all electricity on Earth in order to punish humanity for trying to squeeze their way past the cage of space debris they tried to enclose Earth in. The group is left with three problems: finding food for all the humans, keeping them alive in a land where guns will certainly rule, and keeping Snowbird (the group's lone Martian) alive without a decent supply of Martian-edible food. They end up camping in a nearby cabin after having an encounter or two with ex-military bullies and meet up with an ex-security woman when the Others announce to the whole world (through Spy) that they're going to allow electricity for a week to "see what happens." With this, they're able to commandeer a plane for Paul to pilot to the shelter where the POTUS is hiding; they actually divert their course to Russia in order to drop Snowbird off at a base that has resources to keep Martians alive, and *then* they take the plane to the shelter to find that the government is trying to figure out how to task regional leaders with keeping their communities alive and in conversation with each other. But of course, there are hostile factions who seek to derail proceedings and kill the President - who the crew isn't even that impressed with anyways. Looking to save themselves and deal with someone who's not a man-baby, they steal the plane again and fly off to the commune that Dustin, the place where Namir's "co-husband"'s grew up.
They're forced to land ...
If you've read a post-apocalyptic novel before - or watched a generic movie or TV show - you know the beats of society losing its structure and turning into one big ol' gunfight. *Earthbound* is no exception, and the concept behind the Others disabling all electricity on the planet isn't hugely original; it's like a big ol' EMP pulse went through the whole world. The extraterrestrial framing could be interesting and gives Haldeman an excuse to remove his boot from humanity's neck and give them a shot of proving themselves to the Others. Of course, that doesn't happen, although the aliens' motivations behind what is good and what is not is kind of murky throughout the whole ordeal. That's kind of the point, but the point is moot, and even the flavoring of the Others lording over humanity is less present in the book than past installments. There's less of any flavor going on here, with less weird polyamorous crap and none of the distinctive (if not annoying) first-person embellishment as *Marsbound*. I saw one reviewer say that this book and its lack of whining showed real progression and interesting character work for Carmen Dula, but I would've found it hard to distinguish her from any other female character if she hadn't held the perspective, as seen by how all the men seemed to speak about the same - the dialogue was not rich. I suppose that Namir was still the most interesting character in the book (as he was in *Starbound*), but even he feels less cool and layered than he did before.
Of course, the flat veneer has pros and cons; the things that annoyed me aren't so problematic anymore. But there did seem to be some disconnect between what the story wanted to be and what it actually was; the back of the book describes this as Carmen and co's fight with the Others to take back humanity's place, but there's no reclaiming going on here, and the ending seems like a total copout; the actual plot device is as lazy as it is heartwarming, and Haldeman never explains if . Haldeman never bothers to explain anything about the Others, which could've bene okay if the actual story and its thematic texturing were more lush, but Haldeman skips anything that would make the story actually worth my time. So, as usual, I didn't care. So what if this book didn't complete any satisfactory thematic throughline from *Marsbound* and *Starbound* and managed to feel completely hopeless for all the characters involved? So what if it left any potentially question about humanity completely unanswerable? If it seemed like Haldeman had some sort of artful reason to hold back any thematic satisfaction towards the Others' relationship to humanity besides "they're so powerful we can't understand them," maybe I could've mustered up a crap or two to give, but as *Earthbound* stands, I can't find a reason to care.
To make the matter really unpalatable, the prose is flat and not becoming of someone who teaches college kids to write. It just doesn't hold the weight of his big novels like *The Forever War*, which were imaginative and structurally sound. But *Earthbound* just takes a storyline from a poor direct-to-DVD movie about some globally-impacting EMP pules and unsuccessfully graft it onto an already established world of all-powerful aliens. Its plot and aims seem even more all over the place than *Marsbound* or *Starbound*, and without expounding on anything set up to make the series as a whole seem worth your time.
But I'm starting to think this review is going all over the place, so I think it's time to end it and give Haldeman my decree. This book is kind of a poor ending, but it was also the least irritating of the three short novels to read; that's the benefit of being so bare bones. To differentiate this one from the other two I'm going to give it a 5.5/10, but that's not a good rating; it shows that this book is kinda poor. I'll be careful reading Haldeman in the future; *All My Sins Remembered* and *Mindbridge* are big 70s works that I have to read, and I really like time travel so I'll give *The Accidental Time Machine* a shot, but I don't think most of his 2000s work is worth your time. Read the vintage stuff and stay enthralled by Haldeman; here's hoping I can get back into the SF-reading groove one of these days and give you guys a super excited review. Fingers crossed; till then, thanks for reading my reports on my own reading, and I'll hope to see you around Goodreads for some better reads...
Read
December 20, 2020Color me surprised! At the end of Starbound, I really thought Haldeman wouldn't publish a sequel. Now, I just think he shouldn't have.
It's a pity when an author gets to the point where he has nothing new to say, yet tries to say something, anyway. Haldeman's early works were wonderful, with The Forever War as a prime example.
The story begins with Carmen and her friends at the NASA space center, where they come under attack by various enraged Earth folk, who may perhaps blame them for the problem with the Others. The Others have destroyed Earth's moon to create an asteroid belt around the planet to discourage space travel, and when that didn't work, they turned off all electricity for the world. Nothing that requires electrical power works, and this results in massive deaths from the obvious causes.
One thing for all my hoplophilic friends to note, Haldeman makes the common error of saying that the spacefarers were attacked by people with "automatic" weapons. I can barely imagine a scenario in the future when fully automatic weapons will be more easily accessible than they are now in the U.S., and Haldeman really hasn't laid the groundwork for that situation, so it's likely he's referring to "assault style" semiautomatics here.
There were a number of little "glitches" in the story, when something functioned that shouldn't have, with electricity turned off completely, that bothered me, as well.
When the Others briefly return the power, the merry band makes their way on a NASA jet to Camp David, where the interim president hopes to recruit them, then to California, where one of their members grew up on a farm commune that might be doing all right without modern conveniences, then takes a trip to Eugene, Oregon to bargain for some resource books, then attempts to return to California, but end up in a plane crash when the Others unexpectedly turn off power again.
At one point in the tale, the governor of California sets off a bunch of "hell bombs", nuclear weapons which make everything within a radius of five miles highly radioactive, along the entire state border, to cut the state off from the rest of the world. Just do the math, people, and divide the amount of miles along CA's border by 10 (2 times the radius), and you'll wonder how even a state as large as this one gets enough fissionable material to create that many bombs.
The story "wanders" about just as aimlessly as Carmen & Co. do, nothing significant happens. Give it a pass.
It's a pity when an author gets to the point where he has nothing new to say, yet tries to say something, anyway. Haldeman's early works were wonderful, with The Forever War as a prime example.
The story begins with Carmen and her friends at the NASA space center, where they come under attack by various enraged Earth folk, who may perhaps blame them for the problem with the Others. The Others have destroyed Earth's moon to create an asteroid belt around the planet to discourage space travel, and when that didn't work, they turned off all electricity for the world. Nothing that requires electrical power works, and this results in massive deaths from the obvious causes.
One thing for all my hoplophilic friends to note, Haldeman makes the common error of saying that the spacefarers were attacked by people with "automatic" weapons. I can barely imagine a scenario in the future when fully automatic weapons will be more easily accessible than they are now in the U.S., and Haldeman really hasn't laid the groundwork for that situation, so it's likely he's referring to "assault style" semiautomatics here.
There were a number of little "glitches" in the story, when something functioned that shouldn't have, with electricity turned off completely, that bothered me, as well.
When the Others briefly return the power, the merry band makes their way on a NASA jet to Camp David, where the interim president hopes to recruit them, then to California, where one of their members grew up on a farm commune that might be doing all right without modern conveniences, then takes a trip to Eugene, Oregon to bargain for some resource books, then attempts to return to California, but end up in a plane crash when the Others unexpectedly turn off power again.
At one point in the tale, the governor of California sets off a bunch of "hell bombs", nuclear weapons which make everything within a radius of five miles highly radioactive, along the entire state border, to cut the state off from the rest of the world. Just do the math, people, and divide the amount of miles along CA's border by 10 (2 times the radius), and you'll wonder how even a state as large as this one gets enough fissionable material to create that many bombs.
The story "wanders" about just as aimlessly as Carmen & Co. do, nothing significant happens. Give it a pass.
June 14, 2024
Well, I expected a lot more from the third book in the series. I expected another extraordinary Sci-Fi adventure, with Humans and Martians facing off against the Others, lots of techno extrapolation, and some kind of final climax to the trilogy.
WARNING: Mild spoilers ahead. Not enough to warrant tags, and I won't spoil anything major.
Instead, it's a pretty vanilla post-apocalyptic survival story, with more of the "Guess the POV character" game. (Which I hate because it breaks immersion — as I said in my review of Starbound, the greatest sin a writer can commit.) The only fresh part of the survival story is the lack of any kind of electric power at all due to the Other's interference at the end of Starbound.
Frankly, most of the book was a waste of time, detailing the character's efforts to survive and their interactions with other survivers. Again, a pretty generic post-apocalyptic survival story. Then the very last chapter, we get a totally unexpected assist, just long enough to set up the next book.
"Wait, what? There's a fourth book?"
From the end of this one, there absolutely has to be. But since this was published in 2011, I'm not gonna hold my breath. If Haldeman ever produces one, I'll read it. But I won't be upset if he never does, because the whole "I'm gonna let you figure out who's POV this is on your own" thing is so irritating, it leaves me not caring if I get the rest of the story.
WARNING: Mild spoilers ahead. Not enough to warrant tags, and I won't spoil anything major.
Instead, it's a pretty vanilla post-apocalyptic survival story, with more of the "Guess the POV character" game. (Which I hate because it breaks immersion — as I said in my review of Starbound, the greatest sin a writer can commit.) The only fresh part of the survival story is the lack of any kind of electric power at all due to the Other's interference at the end of Starbound.
Frankly, most of the book was a waste of time, detailing the character's efforts to survive and their interactions with other survivers. Again, a pretty generic post-apocalyptic survival story. Then the very last chapter, we get a totally unexpected assist, just long enough to set up the next book.
"Wait, what? There's a fourth book?"
From the end of this one, there absolutely has to be. But since this was published in 2011, I'm not gonna hold my breath. If Haldeman ever produces one, I'll read it. But I won't be upset if he never does, because the whole "I'm gonna let you figure out who's POV this is on your own" thing is so irritating, it leaves me not caring if I get the rest of the story.
December 6, 2020
Easy read, or it would have been a 1.
Another reviewer commented that this book seems to have been written because the contract called for 3 books and one more had to be written. To me, it seems more like Mr. Haldeman had a bunch of plot notes that could have spanned 3 more novels, but was only allowed 1 and he didn't want to give any up. Then was still in the creative phase when he ran out of time, skipped the editing phase and dropped the rough draft off at the publisher.
This book did not at all live up to the first two. I was excited to see how they were going to get out of the 2nd book's cliffhanger, only to get the end of how they did it and realize I didn't care anymore.
Another reviewer commented that this book seems to have been written because the contract called for 3 books and one more had to be written. To me, it seems more like Mr. Haldeman had a bunch of plot notes that could have spanned 3 more novels, but was only allowed 1 and he didn't want to give any up. Then was still in the creative phase when he ran out of time, skipped the editing phase and dropped the rough draft off at the publisher.
This book did not at all live up to the first two. I was excited to see how they were going to get out of the 2nd book's cliffhanger, only to get the end of how they did it and realize I didn't care anymore.
July 24, 2021
Pointless story, going nowhere. People carrying around guns, shooting, going from one place to an other place. In the end some stay on earth, two are picked up and brought to Mars. The end.
Unclear why any of this happens.
Characters are one dimensional.
I have no doubt the author knows a lot about guns as he fills many of the pages by listing different kinds of them, and tallying the ammo. Several times.
It's a pageturner in the sense that the reader turns every page expecting at some point for the story to become meaningful and coherent. But that never happens.
O
Unclear why any of this happens.
Characters are one dimensional.
I have no doubt the author knows a lot about guns as he fills many of the pages by listing different kinds of them, and tallying the ammo. Several times.
It's a pageturner in the sense that the reader turns every page expecting at some point for the story to become meaningful and coherent. But that never happens.
O
July 17, 2020
Eh. A bunch of people die and a bunch of people live. Nothing is answered. Somehow I cared less about the characters when I started and sadly the 2nd book (which itself was eh) was better than this. I would recommend this only if you have some sense of duty to finish the series. Otherwise, you're better off not wasting your time.
November 22, 2021
Honestly seems like most people rating 3+ stars are being generous. It's like the author just decided welp time to end it better make the aliens come grab the protagonist and take her away from the conflict. This book serves almost no purpose in the trilogy than being a shallow slog through afterthoughts of an apocalypse caused by judgmental God's imposed on Earth for no real purpose.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
February 18, 2023
Carmen returns to Earth. Just after she lands, the aliens called the Others shut off the electricity on Earth. She with her husband and friends have to deal with this new world. This novel dealt a lot with adapting to the new world. It was exciting seeing where this went. A good ending to the series.
December 23, 2017
Quick read like the rest of the series, but the story seemed to wander around as if the author kept changing his mind on where to go. Ending was very abrupt, and the book didn't have much cohesion or overall plot.
February 21, 2019
A disappointing end to the series
I loved Marsbound. Unfortunately, this installment fell short. What made Carmen and the other characters interesting is gone. Now they're flat, reacting only to what happens around them.
I loved Marsbound. Unfortunately, this installment fell short. What made Carmen and the other characters interesting is gone. Now they're flat, reacting only to what happens around them.
June 21, 2019
This is the final book of the trilogy, and overall they were just ok. Definitely had interesting moments, but too much time spent going over previous books, and no time spent on plot or character development.
Still enjoyed reading them, but the ending especially left me unsatisfied.
Still enjoyed reading them, but the ending especially left me unsatisfied.
September 23, 2021
Very enjoyable and fast read.
Essential, if you have read the first two of the trilogy. The second is the best, Starbound. On a five star rating, Marsbound a 4, Starbound a 5, and Earthbound a 3 1/2. Very well written.
Essential, if you have read the first two of the trilogy. The second is the best, Starbound. On a five star rating, Marsbound a 4, Starbound a 5, and Earthbound a 3 1/2. Very well written.
December 21, 2022
Well this series is finished, I might have been a bit prejudiced by reading other reviews first, but it definitely felt like he was just cleaing up loose ends. There was no real overall goal for this novel,ostly just written to wrap up the characters stories.
June 6, 2023
It was good but I did not enjoy it as much as Starbound. It became more an apocalyptic story than a sci-fi story and the ending was less than satisfactory. Still, I did enjoy continuing on with the characters from Starbound.
December 21, 2024
Are the Others God?
The best of the three books. It doesn't end well for
the earth though. It is hard science fiction. The Others are Godlike and their technology is incomprehensible and beyond the scope of the physics we know. A line in the book says it all, it is like magic.
The best of the three books. It doesn't end well for
the earth though. It is hard science fiction. The Others are Godlike and their technology is incomprehensible and beyond the scope of the physics we know. A line in the book says it all, it is like magic.
November 23, 2025
Disjointed and unsure of its own plot at best. At worst, the MC runs off with another woman’s husband only a few days after her own husband dies. Ick.
Also, for such a short book/easy read, there was wayyy too much time spent on recapping previous events.
Also, for such a short book/easy read, there was wayyy too much time spent on recapping previous events.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
July 18, 2017
A great follow up to Marsbound and Starbound. It's an 'end of civilization' novel with some interesting twists. Haldeman really does seem to capture my attention and my imagination every time.
July 21, 2018
Quite a trilogy, worth reading. leaves the door open for extension.
August 4, 2020
2.5.
I haven’t read the first 2 so I was a little confused what was going on. I found the beginning a little meh but once they got to the Funny Farm then I got into it.
I haven’t read the first 2 so I was a little confused what was going on. I found the beginning a little meh but once they got to the Funny Farm then I got into it.
September 5, 2020
Bleak, perhaps realistic given the scenario but completely devoid of optimism. Perhaps the weakest in this trilogy.
April 23, 2022
This is a conventional science fiction adventure format with interesting insights into how humanity might react to its own demise.
I love the play on words in the title.
I love the play on words in the title.
December 18, 2022
Read this without reading the previous two books but still managed to enjoy it.
February 3, 2023
3.5 stars
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