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Tomorrow's Warfare #1
Body Armor: 2000
In the future, war is still hell, and man retains one inescapable survival. As technology advances, he tools of battle - the strategies, the weaponry, the scope of destruction - also advance. Here are eleven riveting tales of the future's battlefields from the celebrated masters of science fiction.
311 pages, Mass Market Paperback
First published April 1, 1986
3 people are currently reading
129 people want to read
About the author
Joe Haldeman
443 books2,218 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 - 6 of 6 reviews
March 1, 2021
This is a pretty good military sf anthology with eleven stories centering on the theme of personal armor in combat. The "2000" in the title doesn't really fit, as I don't remember any of the stories being set that close to the book's publication in 1986. Perhaps the publisher just thought it looked like a cool science-fictiony year. (Little did they know.) It has an interesting introduction by Haldeman, as well as memorable stories by C.J. Cherryh, Gordon R. Dickson, Robert Sheckley, and Harry Harrison. I also quite liked David Drake's Contact!, though my favorite is Hero by Haldeman himself, which became the first section of his classic The Forever War.
December 8, 2025
When I picked up Body Armor: 2000, I expected explosions, exoskeletons, and a parade of futuristic chest plates that would make even a Marvel costume designer sweat. What I didn’t expect was a whole existential deep dive into why humans keep trying to wrap themselves in increasingly advanced shells—as if better plating could solve the very old, very squishy anxieties that have haunted us since we picked up our first sharpened sticks.
This anthology, edited by Joe Haldeman, Martin H. Greenberg, and Charles G. Waugh, is a kind of mad buffet. Each author brings their own flavour of future combat, and I found myself constantly jumping from hard-edged military speculation to playful satire, from grim psychological unraveling to that peculiar sci-fi optimism that insists, “Yes, humanity will absolutely survive, but it will look weird doing it.”
The ghost of Haldeman’s The Forever War hangs quietly over the collection. You can feel that undercurrent of weary realism—this sense that no matter how advanced the tech gets, the soldier inside is still breakable, emotional, and painfully human. Some stories take this literally, with armour becoming a second skin, sometimes a prison, sometimes a crutch. Others go playful, even absurd, especially when Robert Sheckley enters the chat. Sheckley is like the friend who turns up to a philosophy debate wearing clown shoes, but then proceeds to drop the most devastating truth bombs when you least expect it.
C.J. Cherryh brings her trademark grit: that sense of humans being tossed into cosmic machinery far larger than themselves. Her take on armour isn’t about invincibility at all—it’s about fragility, paradoxically highlighted by the layers meant to protect. David Drake, on the other hand, writes from his lived understanding of war’s psychological residue, and you can feel it. His contribution throbs with authenticity, an awareness that armour isn’t simply protection; it’s separation—from danger, from guilt, from one’s own skin.
What fascinated me most was how these writers use armour as metaphor. On the surface, it’s tech—suits, plating, shields, exosystems. But underneath, it’s really about fear. Fear of vulnerability. Fear of death. Fear of losing identity in the chaos of conflict. In almost every story, the armour becomes a commentary on the mind: what we want to hide, what we want to survive, what we want to become.
Harry Harrison pops up with his usual mischievous energy, turning the anthology into a playground of possibilities. Gordon R. Dickson brings his disciplined, philosophical approach, trying to answer not just what future warfare will look like, but why humans will still bother engaging in it after centuries of evolution.
And then there are the smaller stories—the quiet ones, the offbeat ones—where writers like Allen Kim Lang and Thomas A. Easton stretch the concept of protection into emotional or existential territory. A few tales are deliciously chaotic in that pulp-magazine way: bold, messy, unashamedly imaginative. Others are so eerily prescient they feel like early drafts of the tech debates we’re actually having now—drones, augmented soldiers, AI-assisted decision-making, and the ethics of pushing human soldiers beyond their natural limits.
The anthology isn’t seamless—how could it be, with such a range of tones and visions? But that’s the fun of it. It reads like a kaleidoscope of anxieties and hopes from a generation of sci-fi writers staring into the next millennium and asking, “Okay, but what if we need new armour not because the world got more dangerous, but because we don’t know how to stop escalating?”
By the end, I wasn’t thinking about futuristic breastplates anymore. I was thinking about how humans keep armouring themselves emotionally, intellectually, spiritually—hoping something will protect us from each other, from ourselves, from the great unknown.
In that sense, Body Armor: 2000 isn’t just sci-fi. It’s prophecy wrapped in plating.
This anthology, edited by Joe Haldeman, Martin H. Greenberg, and Charles G. Waugh, is a kind of mad buffet. Each author brings their own flavour of future combat, and I found myself constantly jumping from hard-edged military speculation to playful satire, from grim psychological unraveling to that peculiar sci-fi optimism that insists, “Yes, humanity will absolutely survive, but it will look weird doing it.”
The ghost of Haldeman’s The Forever War hangs quietly over the collection. You can feel that undercurrent of weary realism—this sense that no matter how advanced the tech gets, the soldier inside is still breakable, emotional, and painfully human. Some stories take this literally, with armour becoming a second skin, sometimes a prison, sometimes a crutch. Others go playful, even absurd, especially when Robert Sheckley enters the chat. Sheckley is like the friend who turns up to a philosophy debate wearing clown shoes, but then proceeds to drop the most devastating truth bombs when you least expect it.
C.J. Cherryh brings her trademark grit: that sense of humans being tossed into cosmic machinery far larger than themselves. Her take on armour isn’t about invincibility at all—it’s about fragility, paradoxically highlighted by the layers meant to protect. David Drake, on the other hand, writes from his lived understanding of war’s psychological residue, and you can feel it. His contribution throbs with authenticity, an awareness that armour isn’t simply protection; it’s separation—from danger, from guilt, from one’s own skin.
What fascinated me most was how these writers use armour as metaphor. On the surface, it’s tech—suits, plating, shields, exosystems. But underneath, it’s really about fear. Fear of vulnerability. Fear of death. Fear of losing identity in the chaos of conflict. In almost every story, the armour becomes a commentary on the mind: what we want to hide, what we want to survive, what we want to become.
Harry Harrison pops up with his usual mischievous energy, turning the anthology into a playground of possibilities. Gordon R. Dickson brings his disciplined, philosophical approach, trying to answer not just what future warfare will look like, but why humans will still bother engaging in it after centuries of evolution.
And then there are the smaller stories—the quiet ones, the offbeat ones—where writers like Allen Kim Lang and Thomas A. Easton stretch the concept of protection into emotional or existential territory. A few tales are deliciously chaotic in that pulp-magazine way: bold, messy, unashamedly imaginative. Others are so eerily prescient they feel like early drafts of the tech debates we’re actually having now—drones, augmented soldiers, AI-assisted decision-making, and the ethics of pushing human soldiers beyond their natural limits.
The anthology isn’t seamless—how could it be, with such a range of tones and visions? But that’s the fun of it. It reads like a kaleidoscope of anxieties and hopes from a generation of sci-fi writers staring into the next millennium and asking, “Okay, but what if we need new armour not because the world got more dangerous, but because we don’t know how to stop escalating?”
By the end, I wasn’t thinking about futuristic breastplates anymore. I was thinking about how humans keep armouring themselves emotionally, intellectually, spiritually—hoping something will protect us from each other, from ourselves, from the great unknown.
In that sense, Body Armor: 2000 isn’t just sci-fi. It’s prophecy wrapped in plating.
September 5, 2022
A collection of SF stories that are revolving around future warfare and the evils of wars. Some of them a interesting and some slightly bizarre. In any event they have one idea in common - war never changes and solves anything.
January 12, 2021
Not really related to anything.
February 4, 2022
A good collection of power armor/military sc-fi short stories that fares better when it gets silly or weird, as it does with "The Warbots" by Larry S. Todd, and "Early Model" by Robert Sheckley.
March 1, 2015
You can't go wrong with an 80's sci-fi compilation of stories from the 50's, 60's and 70's!, I grew up on this stuff. I remember when these kind of books would be on a spinning rack near the cash registers. I miss those days. My favorite stories in this compilation are "The Scapegoat", "Hired Man", "In the Bone", "The Chemically Pure Warriors" and "Or Battle's Sound". Good stuff...
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews