Quote:
Originally Posted by leebase
I spoke of what I didn't enjoy. I'm interested in what you found cerebral in the lead character. Other than telling us he had a high IQ, there was nothing in the story displaying his intelligence.
Do you find the depiction of women as obligated (and apparently willing) sex partners to any and all of e make soldiers particually intelligent?
I find Honor Harrington to be a much better developed character and it's a young adult series.
Lee
|
Hi Lee,
I didn't have the problems that you did with sexuality.
It's been a few years since I read the book (which I do consider a classic), but I don't remember the women being exactly obligated the have sex with all the men. In fact, I'm having trouble understanding what you mean by both obligated and willing at the same time?
I read the sex as being used for a few purposes:
1) To speculate a little on a future with integrated armed forces
2) To show the increasing alienation of the protagonist as he stays in the army. After he returns home and then go back to the army and finds everyone is now homosexual, that gives the feeling of what it might be like to be a soldier returning from Vietnam to find that nobody understands you, or looks at you funny
3) As a science fiction device to show the future will be different and to show the passage of time. At first everybody is only gay, but eventually, with more time dilation, sex ends up being entirely useless to "Man" since individuals are just like cells in his gestalt.
I don't see them so much as individuals themes or ideas by themselves, but just as part of the backdrop.
To me the aliens in The Forever War were interesting. Since we, like the main character, see them only in between flashes of gunfire, they are truly alien, difficult to understand and outside our experience.
Regarding the idea of the novel as a dystopia, I have trouble figuring out where you get that from (unless you see the character of Man as a horrifying endpoint for humanity?). If you mean earlier on during William's visit to his mother and so on, I always thought that was just a slight exaggeration of contemporary American society. Was it really so far out that you would consider it dystopian?
You point out yourself that there are a number of interesting ideas in the book, and you are doing so with over 35 years of perspective, and 35 years of other authors building on those ideas.
Finally, you asked what "a John Ringo" could do. He wrote his own power-armour-soldiers story and all we got was that Aldenata series; essentially pulp fiction for the 2000's.