Joe Haldeman SF Gateway Omnibus: Marsbound, Starbound, Earthbound

Towards the end of 2011, in conjunction with the celebration of fifty years of coherent, continuous science fiction and fantasy publishing, Gollancz launched the SF Gateway.

Over a decade after launching the landmark SF Masterworks series, we realised that the realities of commercial publishing are such that even the Masterworks could only ever scratch the surface of an author's career. Vast troves of classic SF & fantasy were almost certainly destined never again to see print. Until very recently, this meant that anyone interested in reading any of those books would have been confined to scouring second-hand bookshops. The advent of digital publishing changed that paradigm for ever.

Embracing the future even as we honour the past, Gollancz launched the SF Gateway with a view to utilising the technology that now exists to make available, for the first time, the entire backlists of an incredibly wide range of classic and modern SF and fantasy authors. Our plan, at its simplest, was – and still is! – to use this technology to build on the success of the SF and Fantasy Masterworks series and to go even further.

The SF Gateway was designed to be the new home of classic science fiction & fantasy – the most comprehensive electronic library of classic SFF titles ever assembled. The programme has been extremely well received and we've been very happy with the results. So happy, in fact, that we've decided to complete the circle and return a selection of our titles to print, in these omnibus editions.

We hope you enjoy this selection. And we hope that you'll want to explore more of the classic SF and fantasy we have available. These are wonderful books you're holding in your hand, but you'll find much, much more . . . through the SF Gateway.

Joe Haldeman (1943 –) is a US writer who took a BSc in physics and astronomy before serving as a combat engineer in Vietnam (1968–1969), where he was severely wounded, earning a Purple Heart; later, in 1975, he took an MFA. This range of degrees was an early demonstration of the range of interests that have shaped the Hard SF with which he has sometimes been identified; his experiences in Vietnam have in fact marked everything he has written, including his first book,
War Year
(1972), a non-SF novel set there, and the concurrently drafted (though much delayed)
1968
(1994).

Haldeman began publishing SF with ‘Out of Phase’ for Galaxy in September 1969, and came to sudden prominence with the critical and popular success of his first SF novel,
The Forever War
(1974), opening the Forever series whose description of the life of soldiers in a Future War counterpoints and in some ways rebuts Robert A. Heinlein's vision in
Starship Troopers
(1959), clearly treating that difficult novel as a problematic precursor text throughout. In
The Forever War
interstellar travel is effected by ‘collapsar jumps’, which are subjectively instantaneous but which in fact take many years to accomplish, so that they work as a kind of one-way Time Travel; propelled by this cruel device to temporally distant battle theatres on planet after planet, soldiers are doomed to total alienation from the civilization for which they are fighting, and if they make too large a jump face the risk of coming into battle with antiquated weapons. Their deracination is savage, their camaraderie cynically manipulated. As a portrait of the
experience
of Vietnam the book is remarkable; as Military SF it is seminal. It won a Ditmar Award, a Nebula and a Hugo. ‘You Can Never Go Back’ (November 1975,
Amazing
), published as a kind of coda, is Haldeman's original version of one segment of the novel that had been regarded as too downbeat by Analog; this was reinstated in the 1991 edition.

Two further novels –
Forever Peace
(1997) and
Forever Free
(1999) – are linked to
The Forever War
, though the first of these does not share any other elements than its title.
Forever Peace
, which won a John W. Campbell Memorial Award, a Nebula and a Hugo, introduces, into what has since become a familiar twenty-first century world raddled by local conflicts, two transformative Technologies: cyberlinking of humans into collaborative networks so they can better operate semi-animate tank-like Mecha; and a huge advance in Nanotechnology – ‘nanoforges’ capable of transforming almost anything into usable goods. As cyberlinks make humans too empathic to kill one another, and as nanoforges quickly eliminate scarcity, peace becomes inevitable, and reigns.
Forever Free
, on the other hand, is a direct sequel to
The Forever War
, dealing with the now objectively ancient (but subjectively middle-aged) soldiers who return to Earth to find their species turned into Hive Minds; until they rebel, they are retained as warrants of the past, insuring against errors in Evolution.

Mindbridge
(1976), a novel whose narrative techniques are suggested by its dedication to John Dos Passos (1896–1970) and John Brunner, is composed in alternating sequences of straight narration, reportage, excerpts from books (some written long after the events depicted), graphs and other devices. The underlying story itself is a relatively straightforward space epic, with Matter Transmission, Telepathy-inducing ‘toys’ – actually small aquatic animals – abandoned by an extinct race of godlike Aliens, with a chance of Uplift in the offing.
All My Sins Remembered
(1977) returns to the existential chaos of Earth, and introduces an enduring model of the Haldeman protagonist: a competent hero whose identity is threatened from without, by the Memory-Edit manipulations of worldly powers, and from within, by the need to make sense of an existence without ultimate meaning. In Haldeman's novels, making sense of things is itself an act of heroism. As his most typical books revolve around this task – and are resolved in its often ambiguous accomplishment – it is not surprising that when he has written sequels they tend to be loosely knit, and work most effectively as comprising linked approaches to thematic issues.

Forever Free
aside, there are series to note, the first being the Worlds sequence comprising
Worlds: A Novel of the Near Future
(1981),
Worlds Apart
(1983) and
Worlds Enough and Time: The Conclusion of the Worlds Trilogy
(1992). These books differ from his typical work in featuring a female protagonist, and are distinguished by the broad compass of their portrayal of a Near-Future Earth under the threat of nuclear Holocaust, which is soon realized. In the surviving Space Habitats – each a small world representative of a different kind of civilization – some sense must be made of the human enterprise: the relict planet itself must be preserved and, in the third volume, humanity must attempt to reach the stars. The later Carmen Dula sequence comprising
Marsbound
(2008),
Starbound
(2010) and
Earthbound
(2011), whose protagonist is also female, similarly confronts a Near-Future Earth with what may be a terminal challenge: the human exploration of Mars has triggered an alarm, and the Alien civilization monitoring
Homo sapiens
is only momentarily assuaged by human governments’ seemingly mature response to their presence. Indeed, after being gifted by the monitors with free energy, Earth becomes bellicose, defies the alien demand that we do not yet attempt to exploit space; and is duly quarantined, deprived of modern energy sources, and left to stew. The protagonists escape to Mars.

Haldeman's singletons of the 1980s are only intermittently successful.
Tool of the Trade
(1987), a Technothriller, repeats in a damagingly affectless manner the themes of earlier books; and
Buying Time
(1989) weakens a central tale about the purchasing of Immortality by a displeasing failure to address the kind of society in which this might be acceptable, or the kind of human who might pursue the goal. Later novels range through the SF repertoire.
The Hemingway Hoax
(1990), the magazine version of which won a Nebula as Best Novella, movingly entangles its typical Haldeman protagonist in a complex set of dilemmas (and Alternate Histories) which test to the utmost his capacity to retain moral choice, to remain even approximately whole.
The Coming
(2000) is a character-based meditation on First Contact;
Camouflage
(2004), which won the James Tiptree Jr Award and a Nebula, follows the Gender-shifting experiences-as-human of an Alien long stranded on Earth; in
Old Twentieth
(2005), Immortal time travellers from the future visit the twentieth century to taste its blood and savagery.

Throughout his career there has been a sense – not usual in American SF – that Haldeman thinks of his novels as necessary acts in a lifelong enterprise, a moral theatre whose meaning will be defined only when he finishes. It is perhaps for this reason that he is not good at repeating himself, that those books in which he attempts to do so can be less sparkling than his initial take on their central concerns, and that after two decades his readers continue to await each new title – each new act in the drama of his changing understanding of the world – with very substantial interest. In 2010 he received the SFWA Grand Master Award, and he was inducted into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame in 2012.

The release of the three novels here gathered together,
Marsbound
,
Star-bound
and
Earthbound
, puts at last into one volume the single sustained long story that Haldeman has spent much of the past half-decade writing, a tale which seems all the more powerful now that it can be read straight through. The plot twists, the tense cliff-hanger endings, the arousing ups and downs of the storytelling art, now seem directed to a single purpose: which is to take a cold clear look at
Homo sapiens
, to draw an action portrait of the species in a time of great crisis. (That crisis, Haldeman makes no bones about allowing us to see, is upon us now.) In the first volume, an ancient race is found on Mars, whose job it is to monitor us. They find our wares to be unsavoury, and tell us to go home. In the second volume, refusing to do so, a band of humans makes an interstellar journey to discover that the prohibition was just. In the third volume, the patience of our monitors has cracked, and planet Earth is quarantined, without access to any power sources. Through an elaborate SF series of revelations, Haldeman brings us to earth right here, in the very Near Future. Politicians continue to do what they have always done: to deny the truth. Patriots stare angrily at the closed sky. Eventually, Haldeman gives the reader some hope, in line with the ultimately hopeful tenor of his work for nearly half a century. It is a tribute to the power of this trilogy that not only do we learn a few lessons in species humility, but that we enjoy the trip.

For a more detailed version of the above, see Joe Haldeman's author entry in
The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction
:
http://sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/haldeman_joe

Some terms above are capitalised when they would not normally be so rendered; this indicates that the terms represent discrete entries in
The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction
.