Peter F. Hamilton parle de la Guerre Eternelle

[jerome]

Peter F. Hamilton parle de La Guerre Éternelle de Joe Haldeman dans cet article.

Voici le début :
"I keep coming back to this book. Not that I re-read it much, I don’t have that kind of time-luxury these days. But when Mark asked me to do something for his Appreciation month, it was the one that came straight to the front of my mind. It’s easy, that’s why.

So what is all this about? SF is dying –apparently. The Golden Age classics aren’t really classics, and in any case they’re unreadable these days.

The internet never fails to make me laugh, I go with Charlie Booker on this: debate on the internet is like throwing shoes into the sky to knock down the clouds. However, Mark has chosen to debate the issue, or at least stand his ground. There is good SF out there, but in this case I’d go one step further, and say The Forever War is simply a good book –genre irrelevant. Why? Because I first read it in the seventies, and it’s stayed with me. By any definition that is a good book. Joe Haldeman was a soldier himself, serving in Vietnam. And that experience shows throughout the novel. It shows in the dark, sleek seduction of military hardware, it shows in the attitudes of the soldiers, it shows in the way officers screw up, the betrayal of politicians and government, and finally it shows the absolute futility of physical conflict. It tells the story of William Mandella, a lowly grunt who goes on to be the only soldier who survives the whole war, which thanks to relativity gets to stretch out for centuries. So long in fact that the reason for the war in the first place is lost and finally overcome by a home culture which itself grew and evolved in parallel to events on the frontier. Mandella’s is an everyman story, of struggling to survive and adapt in circumstances completely alien to the one he originated in."