Forever Peace
Joe Haldeman returns with a story about the horrors of war -- and how we might move past them. Julian Class is a physicist working on the largest particle accelerator ever built, a nanobot-constructed ring in the orbit of Jupiter. He is also a 'mechanic', someone who pilots the robotic combat mechs used by the US Army to fight a protracted war against a South America-Africa alliance. When he learns about the potential outcome of the Jupiter Project, he is forced to take action.
Stats for nerds
10recommend
19mentions
18people
2010–2024years
53% recommend42% neutral5% critical
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- Have you read the book Forever Peace? I think it's a foretelling of this, in part. The book doesn't have drones, but what it does have is mechs that fight wars with human remote pilots. War in the book essentially boils down to who can spend more money building more mechs. No humans get killed except by accident, or if the war happens to be against one of those impoverished nations barbaric enough to use human soldiers.
- Joe Haldeman's The Forever War and Forever Peace series of novels chronicle this with pretty decent speculation.
He goes from war, to loneliness, to very low birth rates in society to rising same sex unions, to interesting alternative unions -- all designed by the governments of the time to support the martial future society.
A fascinating pair of books to read that speculate on the future.
(Please don't downvote me for talking about the damn books)
- I heard a story/statement once, that every time a bunch of smart people got together to think about solving the world problems, they all pretty much came up with the same solution: eugenics and birth control.
Both of these are controversial subjects at best.
Have you seen the TV show Utopia? Basically a group of people decide it's in the humanity's best interest to wipe out 90% of the population with viruses. Rather grim, but understandable in a way.
While in the domain of Sci-Fi, the solution I liked better was the idea from "Forever peace" by John Haldeman, where human evolution is propelled to the next step by increasing mutual empathy through technology. The Internet might be a small step in that direction.
- You raise that in an interesting way. I'm all for national defense. But we aren't using them for national defense. I'm all for having a military strength such that we don't have to have wars with Russia and China, powerful, belligerent countries. Strength is a deterrence.
But the capabilities being built, like drone bombing are primarily used in our endless wars, and used by our 'allies' like Saudi Arabia in places like Yemen.
Have you read the book "Forever Peace" by the author of the more famous "Forever War", Joe Haldeman? F.P. is a world with an endless battle against people that could stand in for the endless wars against Islamic terrorists we fight today. In this world they have robots that can be remotely controlled and you can just walk up to people and kill them. It really reminds me of the way technology could make wars in the future.
- If this interests you as a topic, go read Joe Haldeman's Forever Peace - it was written in 1997, but is prophetic about the dynamics of a war fought by remote. Going out into the warzone when you're at work, and coming back to your home in the suburbs every night.
- Another book that explores this (pretty in-depth) is The Forever Peace by Joe Haldeman. It won a couple of awards for sci-fi writing, and I found it enjoyable.
In it there are remote-controlled humanoid killing machines that are piloted by soilders from a bunker through an electronic hole in their head. They can communicate sub-lingually, hear eachother's thoughs, and feel eachothers feelings to such an extent that the men in the platoon (it's 5 men, 5 women) start getting PMS.
