Play Book Tag discussion

Forever Free is the continuation of The Forever War, a book I burned through in a couple days, because I couldn’t put it down. I burned through this one in a single day, but that’s because I WANTED to put it down.

The events of this book take place years after the end of Forever War. William Mandella and the other veterans have settled into a new life in a small colony. Their days consist mostly of physical labor and boredom. The land is harsh and the colony is low-tech, but overall life isn’t too bad and many of them have raised families on the colony, including William. Still, the veterans have had enough of the peaceful, interconnected race of Man that humanity evolved into while they were off fighting. Many of the veterans have the suspicion their freedom is an illusion and that Man is only keeping them as breeding stock, should their cloning practices backfire longterm. So there seems to be only one solution – steal a ship and use it to bypass thousands of years of human development.

The problem I have with this book is that it lacked a lot of the charm of Forever War. It has some action, but much less than the last one. Characters feel mostly interchangeable, even main characters don’t feel fleshed out. Granted, there wasn’t a ton of character development in the last book, but the fast paced plot made up for it. In this book, the action is minimal and the plot turns feel very out of place in this setting. The entire story could have been cut in half without losing anything important. In my opinion, it reads like a short story that the author felt he had to pad until it was finally novel length. Almost everything interesting feels crammed into the last quarter of the book and leaves the most intriguing part of the story to the very end, unexplored.

I think I would have enjoyed this more if the author had abandoned the main characters from the last book, or not tried to slip such a different kind of sci-fi story into the same universe. It just feels disjointed. I don’t know what else I can say without giving away too much about this, or the previous book. As it stands, I almost rated it lower, except I try to save that for much more unreadable books. This was disappointing as a sequel, but I could see the concepts being fun, if Haldeman had explored them more and explored them in a way unconnected, or only loosely connected to Forever War.

**A note - I assumed that this sequel would be more space opera, as Forever War certainly was. However, this sequel is NOT space opera, just cheesy sci-fi. I'm really only posting this review in the Space Opera category, because my review for the previous book is in the same folder..**