Queering Time: ‘The Forever War’ as an Imaginative Exercise
Joe Halderman’s 1974 novel The Forever War depicts an imagined future wherein humanity becomes embroiled in a war against a hostile force of extraterrestrials. Soldiers, originally recruited from the 1970s, venture out into space in order to fight these alien creatures: the Taurans. Due to the incomprehensible scale of space and the limits of human technology, these soldiers experience a profound distinction between the passage of chronological time and their lived experience of their own lifespan. What an individual soldier may live as a few months of combat could in fact, chronologically, involve many years of unconscious space travel. Reading The Forever War as a story about battle and conflict would be to marginalise the far more human dimensions at the story’s core. Halderman uses this time dilation, this differential between lived experience and the passage of chronological time, to explore, at a fictionally heightened scale, the experiences of a soldier returning home from war to find that very home to be a very different place than the one they originally left. The novel has much to say about the exploitation of soldiers and is broadly critical of the processes of mythologisation that ‘justify’ and perpetuate dynamics of conflict. As we follow the experiences of our protagonist, William Mandella, we experience the constant moving of goal posts and a series of continually undermined promises. What he is sold as a soldier he never receives, instead his life becomes a resource to be used and exploited by the military. Most interesting within the novel’s framework are the experiences William has of the rapidly changing nature of human society. Though some allusions are made within the text to account for human diversity, for the most part humanity is understood in monolithic terms. Indeed, this monolithic presentation is part of what I would describe as William’s dystopian return to earth.
The earthly society William returns to has undergone a series of profound changes that constitute a world into which he finds himself completely unable to reintegrate. It is this alienation that ‘forces’ him to reenlist and experience further consequences of time dilation, only widening that disparity. The transformation of Earth is political and economic but also social and this element is primarily presented in sexual terms. Indeed, I would suggest that sexuality is a core component of the novel that operates as a representative of dramatic social transformation and the ways in which individuals can respond to this transformation. Sexuality is the theme that best underscores William’s alienation from the Earth he finds when he returns from war. Herein, I shall briefly trace how the novel presents sexuality, particularly the idea of a fixed sexual orientation or an identity rooted in one’s sexuality, and then proceed to discuss precisely how this presentation repeats sexual anxieties surrounding the erosion of heterosexuality as a naturalised norm and its consequent structures such as the family, reproduction, and relationships between sexed and gendered individuals.
Let us begin with the military. Halderman’s military is presented as a space of relative gender equality. Men and women serve alongside one another and take upon themselves equal roles as they fight in this war against a largely unknown alien foe. From the beginning of the text, sexuality is presented as central to the characterization not just of William but of the soldiers more broadly. The soldiers participate in a largely open sexual culture, wherein they are able to take one another as sexual partners with relative freedom and without the trappings of monogamy. Indeed, during the opening scenes of the novel it is explicitly stated that none of the soldiers have ever actually seen a Tauran and, having never seen the face of their enemy, their attention (explicitly that of William) is instead focused on sex. Sex is the answer to the otherwise monotonous experience of soldiering. All of these pairings that are presented to us at the outset of the novel are, however, heterosexual. There are, therefore, certain limits upon the degree of freedom experienced within this ‘free love’ paradigm.
Homosexuality does not appear within the novel until William returns to earth. From his point of view he has experienced only two years of fighting, during which time he has encountered the extraterrestrial foe and, along with his comrades, committed a massacre under the influence of ‘post-hypnotic training’. Chronologically, this expedition began in 1997 but due to time dilation he returns to earth in the year 2024. The world we encounter is a half a century year old dream of what our current world could have been, but Handerson does not paint a flattering picture. It is within the reorientation provided to the soldiers by the military that we first hear about how homosexuality has become predominant upon earth as a social engineering strategy to curb overpopulation which previously led to a series of class wars the aftermath of which is still having terrible consequences upon terrestrial society. Accordingly, world governments have encouraged homosexual pairings due to the impossibility of accidental pregnancy.
William’s response to this news is originally a kind of ambivalence. In his own thoughts we hear him say that he has never had a problem ‘tolerating’ homosexuals before he departed for war, but that he never had to cope with being around so many. From his initial reaction to the very possibility of homosexuality we can see that there is an implicit anxiety within the perspective of our protagonist. Though there are various gestures made within the text to suggest a kind of tolerance, the language here is relatively flaccid, paying a kind of lip service to the idea of toleration whilst, as with most forms of tolerance, barely concealing a foundation of tension and hostility. This is not helped by the text’s reliance upon clear stereotyping, much of which is queerphobic, in order to characterise its homosexual characters. The male characters are presented as feminine in a way that repulses William, and though he seems able to adapt to seeing female homosexual pairings, the site of male homosexual pairings always remains a source of anxiety and discomfort for him. Having experienced the novel in audiobook form, this was hardly improved by the performance of George K. Wilson, who chose to perform the lines of these gay men with an exaggeratedly camp affect.
The world William returns to is clearly dystopic, requiring those who are able to hire bodyguards whenever they wish to traverse public spaces. This is to protect against the extreme levels of violence that have become effectively normalised, with some of this being sexual violence in the form of rape. Though it is ultimately the consequences of this violence that lead to his reenlistment, it comes after the general sense of alienation that arises from his inability to integrate with the world. Technology and culture have moved on and William does not understand how to navigate it. There are several scenes that demonstrate this being out of step with the world, but none of these examples of alienation remain as consistently stressed as sexuality. Sexuality seems to reflect a more profound kind of alienation that reaches not only inward, to the core of William’s psyche, but also outward, in that his commitment to heterosexuality troubles his ability to connect with others.
In a sense, sexuality is being used here as a kind of shorthand for the innermost and most essential elements of one’s self. Through presenting an earth that has largely shifted away from heterosexuality and that often views it as an artefact of the past, Halderman produces a situation wherein William’s innermost emotional core becomes increasingly out of step with and eventually incompatible with the world that he finds himself in.
It is telling that this is the point of difference between him and home. Other reflections on the experiences of soldiers returning from war have chosen to foreground how the experience of violence changes them as people. It is difficult, such representations suggest, to experience combat, to have one’s life threatened, and to take the lives of others, without that changing oneself to the core. William does experience war as a horror, and the consequences of the massacre he committed due to psychological conditioning are mentioned within the text, but never really explored. Instead, it is the increased violence at home that drives him away.
We are never given room within William’s perspective to consider the transformation of sexual politics beyond the general sense that the world he has fought to protect is a world that has largely forgotten about him. This is to say that much like the other developments presented within the text the widespread proliferation of homosexuality is largely implied to be a negative phenomenon. Indeed, as we shall see, part of the ‘happy ending’ of the text involves a gesture towards the re-establishment and preservation of a heterosexual order. Homosexuality operates within the text as a site of difference that indicates and defines the borders between the world William knows and the unknown. Its role within the text is as a kind of unthinkability. As readers, we are provoked towards asking ‘can you believe everyone is gay?’ as an outlandish source of anxiety.
One core narrative development that most clearly reflects the novels presentation of homosexuality as a corrupting force or as a form of social decline is when William returns to his mother’s apartment and finds her with a female roommate. Over the course of the conversation, William begins to develop some suspicions about the nature of their relationship and when he asks this roommate for clarification she confirms that her relationship with Williams mother is sexual. The idea of his own mother engaging in a homosexual relationship with another woman is a source of confusion and pain for William who ends up questioning the situation by asking “my own mother?”, implying that some kind of betrayal has occurred through the very possibility of this homosexual desire within his own kin. It is as if the thought of the woman who birthed him engaging in sex of a kind other than that which led to his conception is a treachery.
Notably, the transformation of Earth’s sexual politics never provokes any kind of reflection within William. Though he repeatedly attests to his own tolerance, even when psychologically profiled to suggest that he is in fact far less tolerant than he believes, his anxiety over becoming a sexual minority never provokes any kind of reflective empathy. At no point does he wonder about how non-heterosexual people might feel within a heterocentric society. He instead proceeds through the world with a kind of self-assurance that, at least in terms of sexuality, he is experiencing some kind of uncorrupted norm that is counterposed against an artificial homosexuality. This artificiality is foregrounded through the implication of homosexuality within social engineering. Homosexuality is an orientation that is encouraged as part of public policy; it is a government mandated sexuality. We see the strength of this mandate transform over the developing historical timeline of the novel that sees a move from encouraged homosexuality to compulsory homosexuality. The novel goes as far as to mimic the pathologisation and medicalisation of homosexual desire by presenting heterosexual desire as a neurosis to be cured. Indeed, when he returns to the military in a command position his heterosexual desire causes a rift between himself and his exclusively homosexual soldiers. It is the capacity, or lack thereof, of these soldiers to tolerate his desire that becomes an object of critique for the novel, which at no point provokes any similar reflection on William’s own ability to tolerate in return, which is largely presumed by his own perspective.
The Forever War treats these codified sexual identities as productive of largely incompatible modes of living. The heterosexual model and the homosexual model are constantly at odds over the course of the novel and at no point is there ever much consideration given to the possibility of a peaceful coexistence without the implication of not only tension but contest. It seems that the novel is juxtaposing these two different ways of living in a comparative way to see which of them provides a ‘better’ life. Given the overly dystopian tableau within which we first encounter homosexuality, and within which it remains thoroughly embroiled, it is clear to see which path the novel determines as being the victor.
Though William’s heterosexuality is an ongoing point of difference and distinction, his own experience of time dilation prevents him from experiencing a referenced historical period wherein heterosexuality was completely outlawed. Even though he does not experience this period of criminalization, he does injured the encouragement of his peers to undergo a form of conversion therapy that would ‘make him’ homosexual. Of course, he refuses these procedures, understanding them as a form of invasive psychological manipulation and as a kind of violence. At the conclusion of the novel, as the war between the humans and the Taurans reaches its resolution, we are introduced to a far less uniform series of human societies and cultures, one that reasserts space for heterosexuality. It is within this context that one of William’s soldiers chooses to accompany him to one of these heterosexual colonies. Despite having lived his life as homosexual, and being raised within a society that marginalised heterosexuality, this soldier opts to undergo conversion therapy to become straight. Whereas William persistently reacts to the possibility of his own conversion with revulsion and horror, the conversion of his soldier is instead something he greets with enthusiasm. Though the soldier himself says that it is possible for him to re-convert to homosexuality if he doesn’t like the straight lifestyle, William simply pronounces that this soldier will definitely enjoy it. Specifically, that he will definitely enjoy women. It is also within this scene that we experience the novel’s singular moment of transphobic representation, when this soldier references with discussed a sexual experience with an individual described as having transitioned from male to female. The novel never considers that homosexual desire could be as natural and profound as its heterosexual counterpart, instead implying that it is merely an artificial imposition that suppresses a more natural desire.
The very existence of conversion therapy within the novel implies some gesture towards an understanding of desire as something that can be moulded and shaped by sociological and political practises. One might think that this suggests a view of sexuality as not being innate, and yet, this superficial fluidity is immediately undercut by not only the novel’s simple bifurcation of sexuality exclusively into heterosexual and homosexual, but also by the ongoing and implicit thesis within its narrative that heterosexuality is the natural inclination for all human beings and that any deviation from heterosexual desire is a result of something distorting or repressing that ‘natural inclination’. There is no mention of bisexual desire within the novel. The point at which such a rejection of binary (homosexual versus heterosexual) sexuality could have appeared is when William is propositioned by one of his officers: a homosexual woman. Though she professes to have no desire to sleep with him, she offers him sex because she believes that he needs it in order to be able to do his job as her commander. Though this relationship is never consummated, rather than acknowledging that this woman could desire both men and women, the scene is presented as the reassertion of her latent heterosexual desire overcoming homosexual conditioning. The tacit conclusion the novel makes with respect to sexuality is that sociocultural forces can suppress that innate heterosexuality, but that, fundamentally, everyone experiences heterosexual desire and would be happier if they acted on it.
The presentation of desire within The Forever War maintains a binary distinction between heterosexuality and homosexuality that plays into the binary of natural versus artificial, aligning heterosexuality with nature and reducing homosexuality to something that is made, constructed, and therefore secondary to its heterosexual counterpart. With the implication of homosexuality within sociological projects of various earth governments, we can read the novel’s presentation of homosexuality as mirroring many talking points popular among contemporary right wing conspiracists. Homosexuality is effectively treated as a ‘psyop’. The government is turning people gay, like some nightmare scenario pulled word-for-word from some right-wing grifter’s wet dream. We can see the corollaries of this way of thinking within current anxieties over gender and sexuality that manifest in a violent rejection of anything that is perceived as a threat to a heterosexuality that is presumed to be the natural norm. The groom a label directed at queer people of all kinds, but particularly, at the moment, against trans people, presents queer people as actively trying to impose their sexual identity upon others, recruiting more queers. Of course, this anxiety finds its primary objects of obsession in children, whom are continually presented as in need of protection against the corrupting influences of queer existence. Accordingly, the very existence of queer people becomes conflated with a form of sexual violence against children. This, of course, ignores the extensive body of research that demonstrates this to be untrue, and that points to many actual sources of abuse and violence that implicate the communities within which these libellers tend to operate, but it also operates as a rhetorical justification for any violence then committed against queer people. ‘Won’t somebody please think of the children?’ has a long history of operating as a discursive fetish to justify the marginalisation and elimination of groups identified as ‘abnormal’.
Yes, in a sense the ‘happy ending’ of the novel centres around the end of this Millennium long war rooted in misunderstanding and pursued on political and economic grounds by those who, themselves, never had to sully their hands in combat. Much has been made of the parallels between Haldeman’s personal experience as a veteran of the Vietnam War and the distinctly antiwar message of this text. And yet, how is this victory of peace over war most fundamentally marked? It is through the reunion of William with Marygay, his original love interest from whom he has been separated for most of the war. It is to return to her that he seeks out the heterosexual colony, named Middle Finger, and the epilogue of the story announces the birth of the son. The victory is not merely against war but it is a victory against various kinds of social change, all of which are seen as dystopian and corrupting developments that have made society worse. The end of the war is only a victory because it opens the space for the reassertion of a heterosexual ordering of life, exemplified through the birth of a child presumably conceived through heterosexual sex.
While The Forever War provides an imaginary within which Halderman is able to explore his experiences of military service, including a pointed and apt critique of the way the military exploits is soldiers and wages wrongheaded wars for petty reasons, sexuality becomes a stumbling block for this imaginary. A world beyond war is sought and eventually discovered by our protagonist, though we do not know what the real details of this world might look like. Despite everything he has experienced to reach this point, however, William remains obstinately rooted to what he considers to be the norm, demonstrating little willingness or ability to critically reflect on what time dilation means. All that we are provided with is a sense of alienation, one that is outlined in clear sexual terms. But it is clear that this alienation is not something that William wants to overcome. He never expresses any desire to understand what these changes mean, what they might feel like, or to consider the perspectives of those who have lived extremely different lives to his own. Instead, his own experience remains sovereign and unchanging. He cares only to judge.
When he glance back along the history of human civilisation, we can quickly see a diverse tapestry of cultures, perspectives, and ways of living. We can see how these change not only between places but across time. Without indulging in a blindly optimistic view of human progress, it is clear that many developments across our histories have led to a broadening of human experiences and created new ways of living a fulfilling life. When The Forever War presents the future as a dystopia about which it remains entirely uncurious, it denies itself its own potential to ask incisive questions about what worlds we could build together. These questions are never asked, never considered, within Halderman’s novel, which remains stalwartly passive.
As a work of science-fiction, or contemplative fiction more broadly, it remains extremely limited in its willingness to interrogate our world, closing down so many ways of asking that crucial question: what if?
Particularly in our current political moment, the capacity to imagine how we might think and live different is becoming ever more crucial. The Forever War exemplifies how important it is to challenge those limits we presume to be fixed. For without a willingness to do so, we find our creations, our art, stagnating. And with it, our capacity to live.
