When I came back from Afghanistan, at 3am I flew into Boston and was greeted by a group of Vietnam vets saluting and shaking our hands. These vets told us they wanted to make sure no soldier came home ungreeted like they were. It made me cry then and it makes me cry now. Edit: apparently my story is controversial. No I don't agree with everything that happened in Afghanistan, I joined as a medic to help people and that's what I did. I have love in my heart for every race and religion anyone who ended up on my table was treated to the best of my abilities. I am a single human who's belief can and did disagree with my government. I shared this story because I thought it was relevant to the topic of the video. You want to try to hold me accountable for my government's position. I suppose that's your prerogative or you could ask questions and I will share my honest opinion and feelings about my time and experiences.
You landed at a civilian airport when coming back from Afghanistan? Would have thought military personnel (which is implied in your post) would have landed at a military facility?
@@vashranoidit’s very common for US military personnel to take civilian flights to and from war zones. Sometimes you get a military flight sometimes not. Depends on a lot of variables.
Wow, that was awesome of them!! I thank you for your service my friend. I served in Bosnia w/a French NATO unit. I understand how these Vietnam Veterans feel being forgotten,or worse. I hope someday that governments learn some lessons, but that’s just wishful thinking 😂
Well, so far on our planet biology has been shown to have a very hard time changing. Thank goodness. Of course I have no idea what may come, but i do know that im not helping create that tower of Babel!!!!
Fry: "I heard one time you single-handedly defeated a horde of rampaging somethings in the something something system" Brannigan: "Killbots? A trifle. It was simply a matter of outsmarting them." Fry: "Wow, I never would've thought of that." Brannigan: "You see, killbots have a preset kill limit. Knowing their weakness, I sent wave after wave of my own men at them until they reached their limit and shut down. Kif, show them the medal I won."
IQ isn't real and is just a remnant of phrenology. everyone is capable of "becoming intelligent" when they have access to education, though others will excel in specific fields. this reads more like a society shifting towards funding a war rather than investing in their members education and well being. something we should all be extremely familiar with.
@ScribeOfAcadia do they hate you or the empire that has subjected them to war, economic disparity and the destruction of their autonomy?? we should fund each other's well being because we are all human, and we all deserve food and shelter. but I mean if you're admitting that you already hate them for not being like you, we know there's no reasoning with you.
@@alanpennie8013 being a former military recruiter, I can vouch for that, Friend! However, suggest that your google "McNamara's Morons" for a rather interesting and possibly disturbing footnote about the draft during the Viet Nam War.
Didn't know that, thanks! If I had to give 3 books for ppl to read, to understand war properly is: Starship Troopers, Heinlein. Forever War, Haldeman. Regeneration, Barker. 3 different perspectives. And a bonus mention to Forever Peace.
@@CliffdogAlso two men who were veterans of vastly different wars. In short, I wonder what future scifi authors who experienced GWOT will write for military scifi.
@@Hat_With_A_Hat_On the difference is the quality of life. When the economy is centred arround humans instead of capital, the average standard of living is much higher.
"War is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope." -Smedley Butler
Too bad no one in these cdomments seems to understand that and are praising American soldiers aka, war criminals that mass unalive civilians in wars for profit.
@yourt00bz Not all of us care to view great people through authoritarian lenses. I'm sorry that you're so attached to identify with grades others have made for others.... Good day. Edit: And I saw some of your other comments, I'm glad you're privy to the agenda, however, why not just state this without attacking me? If you see the real agenda, it's to keep us fighting and attacking each other based on a CLASS system. It matters not ones origin, as we all come from a great and wonderful mysterious place... Don't shoot the messenger bro, we're on the same side. Be well.
I am a native Vietnamese with family and relatives from both sides of the civil war, and have experienced life both in Vietnam where I grew up and in the US. I read The Forever War during a period of great but also traumatic emotional development. I can relate in an odd way to the main character of this book, and by extension Haldeman himself. Great read, i always revisit the book once a year. P.s. I did not grow up during wartime, my parents were children in the waning years of the war. However the impact of the war was still felt in someway by children of that generation. Some families, from both sides, came out of it worse than others. And some children have inherited more inter-generational trauma than others.
I agree, you don't need to grow up in a war torn nation to experience the psychological side effects. If anything children of parents who experienced war suffer as well. I think that's the real insidious nature of war is that once it's over, it's never really over for people who've lived it. It takes a lot of work from both mental health practitioners and from the patients themselves to even remotely recover from it.
@@johnrivers3813yes I fully agree. Unfortunately, mental health service and professionals were not available for my parents, and currently remain limited. Mental health issues in my home country carry a stigma, and people, older folks especially, carry emotional wounds that never heal because they think themselves strong and therefore refuse mental health care, and look down upon those who seek it. I love my parents, but it remains true that I've had to seek therapy and essentially heal on my own and with the help of friends, away from my family.
Yeah it is interesting, how trauma often has a more profound effect on the children of the victims, than it even has on the victims themselves. The UK did a study in the years after 9/11 and the tube attacks, trying to find which biographical traits, or combinations of which predict who will become a terrorist. It was a waste of effort mostly, but they found just one trait that had any significant correlation, and that was being the child of refugees. While it is still rare even for that demographic for it to grow so far, they found that children who grow up seeing their parents discriminated against by the society in which they live, will often just grow up to see that society as being fundamentally evil. And as such, deserving destruction. Also and entirely separately, you can Google sometime, "what are the three kinds of imprinting humans do?" Humans do very little imprinting, we imprint on our family, men alone imprint on their ideal mate, and everyone also does "limbic imprinting." Limbic imprinting is, during the period of time when you are a nursing baby, you will imprint on your mother's (or whichever woman nurses you) sympathetic tone. Your body's alarm response will feel hers, and grow to match it. Your baseline anxiety level, for all your life, will be whatever your mother's anxiety/fear level was, during the first few months in which she nursed you. It doesn't seem to make much sense for it to work this way for humans, but it greatly increases the chance of survival to adulthood for babies of low-status apes. But yeah, it means if your mom is traumatized whenever she is 19 and nursing you with a genocide playing out in the background, you are going to be sympathetically tuned like that, like she is in that moment, for all your years.
I worked in VN from 2008 to 2012. I was dating a girl from Da Lat and we went to visit her family there, we worked in HCMC. We were walking downtown. It’s a pretty town. I was telling her how I didn’t have a car in High School but my friends did. And she sincerely said aww that’s hard. Then we passed a building in the town square and she told me that was where her and her mother and her sister and her would walk to daily to get a ration of rice. Their house was easily over a mile away. It would have been in the mid 1980s when she was a kid and around the time I was in High School. I felt an inch tall complaining about that stuff. Cringe! I told her that she said she hadn’t even thought of it.
@@loganyoutube5418there are few statements/opinions quite as ignorant as yours. have you ever served? have you asked why this person served? have you thought about criticizing their government instead of them? perhaps they were a defender rather than an offender. i’m anti-war myself, but what you said isn’t how you go about talking about it.
I wish you all the best, youll feel better the more you seek help. I know that it can be so exhausting and expensive, but it’s worth in order to feel good. Have a great day :)
So what you expect me not to go out of my way to random worlds to extinguish Xenos? That's some first rate Heresy and the Inquisition has been notified
Haldeman's character became a "regular" due to a total lack of ability to reintegrate. Most of my generation who served (I just turned 75) pulled one tour of duty and then took the dive back into society...with mixed results. I turned 21 a month after my enlistment in the Corps up. I looked 14... Entering college was an adjustment in the Fall of 1970... Not a "hostile" campus environment...but alien for all that... The people who graduated from high school in the Spring of 1970 and moved directly to college very different from so many who graduated in 1967. . In 1965 a Marine infantry squad leader (Sgt.) might have been 24 or 25... In 1969 he might be 19 or even 18. War not only inflates the currency...but also the leadership. The Corps went from 170,000 in 1965 to 300,000 in 1968. "War is boyish...and is fought by boys..." Herman Melville YP
Man I felt this shit. I started running a division of 15 nuclear trained machinist mates on a submarine when I was 22. It's incredible the amount of responsibility that can be loaded onto young, and inexperienced men.
You old soldiers never miss a chance to talk about your days of service like they were your high school football glory days. You were a heel for a government that did not and still does not care about you. You can rationalize it any way that you want, but just call it like it is: you’re a bootlicker. In a different time and place, you would have been one of the guys on trial at Nuremberg.
The Forever War has always been my favorite SF novel. I'm also fortunate enough to have had Joe Haldeman as a professor during the years he taught writing at MIT. A great book, and a great man. Haldeman fun fact: after having been wounded twice in Viet Nam, he was shot again in Florida while riding a bike along the highway.
Thanx for the additional fun fact in your comment. I have a friend who grew up in Florida and really hates the place. He's going to enjoy hearing a reminder of why he'll never ever set foot in that state again.
Sexuality themes aside, Forever War suddenly reminded me of one of my favorite (and first) sci-fi universes: Battletech. The setting itself is designed to perpetuate war and alienation as a theme which crops us like weeds in every aspect from the novels to the games. Humans merge with machines to become gods, nation states form, split and cannibalize each other like a forest of bacteria under a microscope. In at least one story arc, the descendants of a great war hero self-isolate to avoid being caught in a pending series of civil wars, only to then return to the setting hundreds of years later as a techno-eugenics cult with bizarre customs hell-bent on reconquering the Earth. Who needs aliens when humanity does a splendid job of making aliens of itself?
Glad to see Joe Haldeman getting coverage on this channel. One of the first sci-fi writers I read, and still one of my favorites. A gritty, brutal, cynical take on war.
I first read this in the early 80's. My brother was a big scifi/fantasy reader and first handed me Starship Trooper. I thought it was great and then he handed me Forever War afterwards. Forever War blew me away. I enjoyed Starship Trooper, but saw how shallow it was compared to Forever War. It was my first encounter with time dilation. I loved this concept in science fiction.
I loved the Forever War. It was my first introduction to time dilation, too (and B-theory of time). It hurt my brain to understand it at first, but when I finally could grasp the ideas behind special relativity, it changed my perspective of time and my place in it. Got me interested in understanding physics (at least a layman's understanding, anyway). The book was great, though. Didn't really enjoy the sequel anywhere near as much, but got through them.
I also loved Forever War. That and Marsbound are still my favorite scifi stories. Really stuck with me as a 17yo. I'd never read anything quite like it.
Thank you ,as always, for your insight and analysis. As a Vietnam Vet, after I got home I was adrift and a stranger in my own country. I managed to finish a degree then left to work overseas, for most of my life.
I think it can be hard for some of us to really understand how radical some of these ideas were, because of how obvious they are to us. Yes, TFW's handling off sexuality is crude, awkward, and ultimately selfdefeating. But the simple fact that it wasn't "gay=bad" was radical for its time. We should also try to keep in mind that the audience he was writing for wasn't used to this message, and may have needed to have it repeated, just to be able to hear it.
I think that also goes to prove some of what the book has to say about alienation. It wasn't written that long ago in historical terms. Yet here we are alienated from it because of a rapidly changing culture and someone from them transported to now wouldn't know what to think.
@@bentuovila5296 the book makes the only honest observation anyone can make about the sexual mores of other generations. Unless you believe we, by grace of god, are living during the one moment in history when sexual morality has been perfected, you have to conclude that everyone who ever moralised or passed judgement about such things is full of shit.
I read a twinge of shame in how mandala was going on and on and i just thought "Joe fucked either a ladyboy or a trench buddy and he felt real bad about it afterwards"
This book isn't cited as often as Starship Troopers in how it influenced HellDivers II, but I feel like it was almost as influential in the game's story's/world's creation.
@@ThommyofThennI’ve literally never encountered a single person who has the viewpoint but i’ve seen a dozen who believe that these non-existant people exist lmao.
@@ThommyofThenn i’m almost certain you were trolled into believing this. You’re telling me that someone looked at helldivers 2’s trailer and said “yup, so true!” As if the satirical bug killing game is in any way remotely applicable to their own lives or views. Where exactly do you encounter these people?
Quinn, this video was BEYOND Phenomenal. You really nailed the theme of the book and what veterans go through and the crushing reality of our future. Bravo sir.
I read this book when I was 14 and it had a great impact on me. It's the reason I never joined the military, and why I found that physics and philosophy can be bed fellows in fiction.
If this is your research, I find it thoroughly impressive, Sir. Something that I hope to emulate. I am largely self-taught because I find it difficult to learn in a classroom environment. I have found out recently that it was exacerbated by ignorance of my recently confirmed autism. So, at 65 years old, I hope to improve my abilities as a writer, composer and researcher by studying how people such as yourself do your work since emulation has been the main process I've used to educate myself. i am quite sure after you read this, you'll dismiss me as some wacko. That's quite alright, I am used to it. Thank you very much for sharing your fantastic insight once again.
Excellent review as always Quinn. I read this book, of all ironic places, when I was deployed in Iraq in 2016. I found this in a drawer of a desk at our company headquarters and read it over the course of two days and loved it. I had no idea that Haldermann was a veteran himself but I can certainly see it now in his writings. i also didn't know the inspiration for the book was the Vietnam war, but it is clear as day to me now. Thank you for reviewing this. Keep up the good work man!
@@alanpennie8013 That, and just the way he writes in the beginning when the characters are going through training. I read this and even then I thought this had to either be written by a veteran, or someone who knows veterans.
Cannot begin to tell you how much my week needed an injection of intelligent and thought-provoking content. Excellent video as always. Yours is my most anticipated channel on TH-cam.
I’m so glad you are covering this! Honestly this is one of my most favorite books of all time! I read this in highschool and I still think about it all the time!
Multiple time GWOT veteran. I related to this after so many deployments. The war had no end in sight and we kept being sent right back. The GWOT was the Forever War.
Terrorism is an idea, you can't fight an idea, it doesn't have armies or navies, it lives in the minds of the alienated, and can pop up anywhere you get enough alienated men, and such a war can truly be fought forever, since every heart and mind cannot be won.
Global War on Terror, or “GWOT,” but also used to describe diplomatic, financial, and other actions taken to deny financing or safe harbor to terrorists. This also included operations in the greater Middle East including Afghanistan and Iraq, also Africa and the Philippines.
Hey, Quinn! Just want to say that your Dune videos helped me out of a rut. With all the horrible news coming out of Gaza/Palestine, I needed something to take my mind off things here on Terra. I binged them all (and even rewatched them, what a dense and imaginative world). A friend is a big fan of the series, but she never mentioned how weird it is, like truly. It's an amazing world and I thank you for covering it with so much love and care.
Thank you for covering one of my favorite novels! Years ago, it took about a second reading to realize that the entire book is from a first-person point of view of William. No conversations or scenes, other than inner dialogue, outside of the main character. A lot of work for the lead if ever made into a movie...
On the topic of sci-fi novels written from the non-human perspective: There are several I can think of: Nor Crystal Tears, by Alan Dean Foster. This is part of his Commonwealth novel series, and tells the story of the foundation of the Humanx Commonwealth from the perspective of a Thranx, an insectoid alien. There is also The Genocidal Healer, told from the perspective of a non-human doctor dealing with the guilt of failing to correctly diagnose and treat a planetary plague. This is one of Alan E. Nourse's Sector General series. The author C.J. Cherryh has written several series told mostly from the perspective of non-humans. There is the Faded Sun Trilogy, told from the perspective of a Mri, one of a species of warriors honor-bound to serve another species, the Regul. And her Chanur series is told primarily from the perspective of a hani ship captain, caught in a conflict between the humans, the kif, and the knnn. Now, one question is, are these alien perspectives alien enough? That, I believe, is up to the reader to decide...
I randomly looked up Revelation Space when thinking about the Ultras and got through your vid on the Dawn War before i realized I'd watched or listened to ALL your stuff on ASoIaF and Dune years ago. I'm really glad you're doing well at this, your sharp perception and ability to compile oculted themes in these works really impressed me and after binging 4 of your vids from the past year, the hunger to finish The Sprawl and Inhibitor trilogies reawakens.
I just noticed that the description has an actual summary of the video! I wish more people used the description for summaries rather than purely ads. Definitely one of those smaller things that I really appreciate about your work but didn't immediately notice.
I want to become a writer and I noticed that The Forever War was one inspiration for my sci-fi novel. The feeling of alienation takes place at the start of the plot and the urge to leave earth is what causes the main characters to end up in a warzone, on the wrong side of a pointless war.
Thank you for finally covering this series. It has been one of my favorite series for decades, and one I have often recommended to young sci-fi readers. Thou Art Awesome, Quinn. Thank you.
Ever since i started watching this channel I have begun reading far more than I ever thought I would. It is bizarre how much resistance there seems to be to the concept of reading books, and once you break through that barrier it is like unlocking an almost endless archive of media that was hidden in plain sight.
This is the most amazing video you have ever done. Speculative fiction is always social commentary, and for you to connect these books to such relevant history is a supreme accomplishment. You really take your rightful place as a significant public intellectual with this one. Bravo sir! Encore!
I really like the section at the beginning of the video where you go over some of the history of science fiction. A whole video on the topic would be super interesting to watch!
You should be proud of this review. Perfect insight along with the understanding of where Haldeman was at the time, the political climate when he was writing it and meshing it seamlessly and keeping it streamlined. This is up there with your work on Dune.
This was a great book! glad to see you are covering it. One thing I love is just how different society becomes between each mission the guy goes on, so much to the point where he decides "well this place sucks, might as well go back out again" haha.
As someone who is getting back into reading, discovering your channel has been a godsend. Keep up the great work and please have more book recommendations. Im slowly watching through your vids and have lots of books on my readlist now.
at 6:43 I have to pause and come back at a later date. First, I'm a fan of yours Quinn. So I'll take your word that this book is good. Second, I'm an Iraq war vet. I'll have to get this book, read it, then come back and watch the rest of your video.
A vet myself, I picked this book up at the MWR library towards the end of my deployment. Interestingly enough, I read Starship Troopers at the beginning of my deployment. I highly recommend The Forever War as well.
A beautiful endorsement Mr. Quinn. I have read these on deployment during my time in the Navy along with other great books like Heinlein's Starship Troopers and Frank Herbert's Dune series. Your recommendations are always spot on.
I am so glad this video has been made! I am not a total Sci-Fi buff apart from Dune and Star Trek, but I listened to the Audiobook of "Forever War" a couple of years ago and I was instantly fascinated. "Forever War" is such an intelligent, sensitive and sensible book, great literature in general, I loved it so much and I am very happy that you got around talking about it.
I’m so happy to see you cover forever war. I love this book. I don’t share the perspective that its social themes are dated. But, to me, I think that the criticism would more aptly be that it seems uncharacteristically without modern euphemism, it can be curt, and, in current non-descriptive parlance, “problematic”. I do, however, think that the view and perspective attributing a “dated” nature, in a sci-fi fan’s review-is a novelty of the last 5 years. This is a minor gripe. I love your videos and really enjoy your views and tellings!
Man, I'm a Sci-Fi fan since my childhood and a Dune fan since my 20s, but your channel has really fired me up about Sci-Fi in general. Thanks to you I read Children of Time. A great novel, so original. And a challenging read because of my fear of spiders. I really think you should do a video about Cli-Fi. The Ministry For The Future of Kim Stanley Robinson is a prime example.
I'm gonna need an order of more 40 min + videos from you Quinn. Just too good to listen to you talk about these books you read and your thoughts on them too. Great work. Interesting book also.
Vernor Vinge's "A Deepness in the Sky" from 1999 also follows a society of spider people. His novel "A Fire Upon the Deep" 1992 (same series) explores a medieval society of distributed intellects for whom one 'person' is distributed across several creatures in a pack. I highly recommend Vernor Vinge's Zones of Thought series for its exploration of both time dilation at sub-FTL travel and his exploration of how non-human intelligences might think and act.
Yep, thats the first one that came to mind for me as well. Been decades since i read it so the specific plot is long lost in time but it remains in my memory as both thought provoking and easy and pleasant to read
My older sibling was killed in Vietnam which lead to me joining the military. After I got out I was struggling with the return to civilian life and being a dad. At one point my pregnant wife was hospitalized and I found John Steakley's Armor in a waiting room. Being a post Vietnam era book it was a direct opposite to Starship Troopers. It was re-aligned my thinking with things I was struggling with at the time.
I love this book!!! I’ve read it 4 times already and I continuously draw similarities between the story and the characters with myself and my 26 year career in the Army. Quinn, thank you for taking time to truly break this book down as you did/do with DUNE!!! Outstanding job
Great video. Future Shock, as coined by Alvin Toffler, is definitely a major theme as well Even dropped by name, "but in a physical sense". Williams captain said it with that first encounter with taurans in the collapsar
Armor has been a favorite of mine for ages, I bought several copies when I was in the Army because I'd loan it out and either me or the guy who had it would PCS, lol.
As a straight dude I’ve taken the homosexuality topic as a clear indicator that it goes both ways. A straight man in a gay world is no different than a gay man in a straight world. The straight man can’t change his sexuality to match the gay world in the same way a gay man can’t change his sexuality in a straight world. Charlie’s ability to change to straight is no different than a gay man pretending to be straight can easily choose his homosexuality to express in a world that it is acceptable. The book was written when homosexuals were genuinely despised by a large portion of the world.
It’s like this, Charlie was always straight but the governments influence kind of forced him to act and appear as a homosexual. When given an o to be his genuine self he chooses to be what he always was. The same way gay men who once had to pretend to be straight to conform to society can now “reveal” and live as their genuine self. It always seemed as a means of puttin the predominately straight reader into the homosexuals shoes of the time the book was written. Reading it as a teen boy in the 80s it was an eye opener on how gays must have felt at the time. Even then homosexuality was still seen as odd or even unacceptable.
For anyone who loves science fiction you make amazing videos. You're really great at communicating how interesting and how deep are all these cool science fiction stories really are. All the best man keep up the great work.
One aspect not mentioned is that Mandela had an IQ160, as it was deemed that weapons systems by then were so complex, that they required geniuses to use them. And only all candidates of IQ 160 were conscripted to this war.... no US Senators sons here.. Paul Hardcastle "19" says it all, like this book.....
I feel that "Total Blackout" is also relevant, here. The hanging, ghoulish realities and costs of war are really on display in that one. It's not sci-fi, but...well, it's not entirely NOT...
Quinn. Thank you for this in depth analysis. I've read the book a couple of times and on my travels, have listened to the audio book. You've brought several things here to my attention that I hadn't considered over the years.
You should check out The Black Company. Its a fantasy series but similar in a way to Forever War. A vet writing about things he knows, but it follows a mercenary company working for the evil empire.
I didn't see "Starship Troopers" as glorifying the military. It's intention was to propose an answer to a question, which was "How can a democracy function when its citizens vote for their own interests to the exclusion of the shared interests of everybody?". I think this is still a cogent question, though I'm not sure that the answer presented by "Starship Troopers" is the right one. I really appreciate your perspective on the sexuality components of "The Forever War". I thought it was weird, but as a straight guy, I didn't have the experiences necessary to pick it apart in that way. I suspect that homosexuality is actually an adaptive behavior, honestly. I have some guesses as to why, but I'm eagerly waiting for Bret Weinstein to detail the hypotheses he has about it because I'm sure his background as an evolutionary biologist renders his hypothesis far more worthy of testing than my guesses.
Look at it from another perspective. Starship Troopers is no utopy, but a dystopy. Heinlein very often stressed he greatly values freedom and individuality and detests Soviet communism. Yet the teachers use the same arguments why this society was "scientifically proven" the best. That's a core Soviet propaganda point. Heinlein shows what will happen if in a society, people no longer care for the common duties and obligations. The world isn't an "answer" to "how should democracy look like", but a cautionary tale: "this is how democracy WILL look like if we come across an existential threat unprepared". And suddenly, all the one-dimensionality of the characters, all the dubious choices up to war crimes, everything falls into place. The Arachnids are presented as un-changing, there IS no dialogue or compromise with them - as far as the government, authoritarian because of public political disinterest, knows. To survive, those willing to defend humanity suddenly get all the bargaining power and form a caste - exclusionary, as "those unable to serve in the military" (like Heinlein IRL) are used for pharmaceutical testing - and suddenly have the exclusive monopoly on political power. Heinlein calls to not let it come to that, to shoulder the burden of defense mutually and solidarily together.
@@enysuntra1347 - That's a very interesting idea. I hadn't thought about it from that perspective. But it does make a lot of sense as a perspective on the book. I think the book makes a lot of people uncomfortable partly because of the idea it proposes, the idea that citizens do have some obligation to be statesmen in the small. I don't think that idea is one a lot of people like to hear as the primary motivation because the fundamental basis of their politics is a selfish resentment of others. I suspect then that the obvious militarism becomes a target to discredit and distract from the main idea. Your framing is a really excellent one from the perspective of getting people to engage with the main idea, regardless of whether it was Heinlein's intention or not.
I don’t know why you’d wait for the opinion of an idiot to form your views on homosexuality. On ivermectin, Brett claimed that it was "a near-perfect COVID prophylactic". The imbecile didn’t get vaccinated, and instead claimed that ivermectin was a perfect cure to covid that was apparently only being withheld for the benefit of ‘big pharma’. He was wronged back in the campus protest era, but like so many wronged he has pivoted into the realm of absurd conspiracy in response to his unfair treatment.
@@Omnifarious0 While Heinlein was sympathetic to the military, I read - in rereading, not the first time! - the militarism of Starship Troopers as a description what will happen. Servicemen now have a very good societal standing in the Ukraine, because they are those who defend the society. IMO this goes on steroids if the threat is as existential as the Arachnids. The better conclusion is not "Starship Troopers bad because of militarism", but the question: "How can we avoid extreme militarism in a society that has to defend itself?" This question was prevalent at the dawn of the Cold War when Heinlein wrote Starship Troopers, and in February of 2022, it suddenly became very relevant again, especially if a Red Chinese invasion attempt on Taiwan is indeed a question of "when" and not "if".
@@enysuntra1347China will never be able to invade Taiwan without using nukes or using extreme amounts of blood and material. The first thing they would have to do is build the world's largest navy. The United States has the current world's largest Navy, has 11 super carriers along with all the support and fleet ships needed to defend each of the carriers. The Chinese have three regular carriers one of them is a Soviet Era ship. They are building a fourth ship but are decades away from being able to field anything close to the size and fighting power of the US Navy. Assuming the US Navy doesn't add to or even modernize the current fleet, then China would have a chance in a straight up fight. Assuming thet get their naval assets in order , then China will have to frost train then concentrate their forces in preparation for an amphibious landing. It will need to be the largest one ever seen in human history, many times larger than what was put together for D-Day. China would then need to somehow trick all of the world's intelligence gathering apparatuses including satellite assets that can sit over China and watch. That China's very large concentration of troops and naval assets is not the prelude of an invasion. Assuming China gets all of that done without preventive strikes disrupting the preparations. The Chinese Armada will then have to cross the Formosa Straight averaging 180 km from the mainland to the island it will take most of the day to get there. It will be a day in hell for the Chinese Navy. As shore-based anti-ship missiles, naval and land-based aircraft, and of course scores of surface ships and submarines that had days if not weeks to get into the area, all light up the now target rich environment turning the bottom of the Formosa straight into a ship graveyard. Assuming after a day of hell at sea for the Chinese Navy the battered armada didn't turn back and finally make landfall on Taiwan. An island that is either a mountainous or an urban environment. The most defender friendly environment man has found so far in warfare. Top that off with an island population that has had military conscription for generations meaning almost the entire population males except for children know how to fight as a military. While the bloody fighting is happening on the island the 180 km long supply line on the open ocean will be raided non stop. Forcing the Chinese troops to either find food ammunition and medical equipment locally or go without. When they go without long enough and they will no longer be a threat. Then IF (super big if here) the Taiwanese Government were to fall to Chinese forces, there would still be generations of guerrilla warfare afterwards. China and Taiwan are never going to be unified through warfare. Taiwan doesn't have the capability to take over China and China can only take over Taiwan if the rest of the world lets them. Even then it would cost so much in blood and equipment it would be a Pyrrhic Victory. Ultimately weakening the victors on the world stage and possibly even the fall of their governments from internal strife. The only way China and Taiwan will ever unify is through willful diplomacy. Which is unlikely but not impossible.
Maaaannn, when you said Haldeman wow it as a response to Starship Troopers, I nearly embarrassed myself jumping in to "um ackshully" because I thought you were falling to note the military service! The Forever War may be the singlemost (personally) influential book I ever read, by which I mean that it's the only book that really, truly changed who I became as an adult to any degree. Thanks for giving it the flowers it deserves, especially through such an eloquent exploration of themes I just didn't have the knowledge or development to fully appreciate.
... And I'm really glad that I left the preceding comment as soon as you proved me wrong, because now I'm going to do something totally new to me and tell you that your interpretation is fundamentally wrong, at least when it comes to the secondary message regarding sexuality. Kindly return the favor & hear me out anyway. Mandela kept thinking about how he wasn't gay and couldn't be gay no matter how hard he tried because one day everyone was straight & he wasn't heterosexual, he was normal. Literally the next day from his perspective, up is down and black is white and he's, in his own words "a sexually deviant dinosaur" to the nice, normal who actually had to be trained to repress their anxiety about his perversion (with mixed success) and literally couldn't even speak to without advanced degrees in the equivalent of old English. And he still can't even repress his deviance, despite genuinely suffering because of it. Not as much as the war itself, of course... but without the war, he never would have lived to see it. Yes, Charlie is able to easily decide to undergo medical treatment to be straight - treatment which was unavailable to Mandela, since it wasn't developed for centuries after he & Charlie shipped out on that last tour. Mandela spent that time coming to terms with his newfound minority status BECAUSE medical "correction" wasn't possible. Charlie never had to come to terms with anything except his own equally artificial belief that anything other than exclusive homosexuality is immoral & disgusting, even if it's an incredibly rude thing to say to one of the poor, unevolved dinosaurs the brass insisted on appointing to command positions based on seniority despite their equally inevitable incompetence. Plus Charlie was genetically engineered to be gay in the first place like literally every human from his own time, because population control was an issue that actually mattered, and nothing prevents accidental "mammalian" reproduction like universal abstinence from reproductive sex. And then Charlie made it home alive, only to find that the promised perfection of human genetic engineering had left him just another obsolete model, like Mandela. Unlike Mandela, he had the choice before he had the time, and he took it. One might even say he... transitioned. After both men tried sex with clones of his preferred gender & found it repulsive, agreeing that the human family just didn't include either of them anymore. Except for that tear jerker last line, but let's not spoil it for the new kids. YOU know, and so do I. ;) But anyway, if that's not enough, contrast it with the depiction of sexuality in the 90s Mandela imagined, where the military solved the problem of women in the service degrading unit cohesion by commenting sexual rivalry amongst the boys (who will inevitably be boys): by requiring exactly 50% female recruitment so that there's always enough ass to go around, even assigning random partners each night to foster that same cohesion regardless of what (or whom) either of them might think about it. All heterosexual, of course. Mandela's not super enthusiastic about that. Though to be fair, he is extremely entertained when the first batch of troops reaches the space station prepared as their main staging ground & the command staff "unleashed their men on our women, eager & compliant in accordance with military tradition (and law)." Law. I won't insult you by explaining Joe Haldeman doesn't invoke military law to signal moral approval*, but I will argue that even if your understanding of that subject reflects the author's personal anxiety regarding his own sexuality, that scene - just the one line, really - is his only real attempt to *defend* it. He never made any attempt to sanitize heterosexual OR male sexual privilege, any more than he tried to hide that Mandela was pure without avatar. But the closest he ever came to any statement on the inherent meaning of his own orientation was to categorically and definitively state that the women are "eager" because it's literally a crime to withhold consent. So that's my textual support, and I stand by my interpretation, which is one thing. Saying you're is wrong is another matter, but that's where I couldn't help some personal speculation... I'm pretty sure you're younger than I am. I'm positive that if you aren't queer, you're a LOT younger. Apologies for the presumption, but it is relevant for what that's worth. When I first read The Forever War at the age of 12, it was 1993 (just a few years before Mandela's deployment to the front lines in 1997, remember) and I thought I was lesbian. I was wrong, not only because I realized I was ALSO attracted to men while still a teenager, but because I was a trans man according to the social paradigm shift that definitively asserted sex and gender are distinct bio-social phenomena more than a decade later. Forgive me, but I cannot believe any queer, even one young enough to have survived the political heyday of "AIDS is God's cure for gay cancer" could think Haldeman's argument was that being gay is weird even if it is involuntary, or even that the book was "progressive for its time." The Forever War was where I learned the concept of orientation, miraculously before the people who are STILL screaming that people like me are just a bunch of sexual deviants choosing perversion as flimsy cover for predation. Joe Haldeman was the first person who told me they were full of shit. When the entire movement was doing better than any of us pariahs could hope by rallying to the "please stop killing us, we can't help being inferior," it was Joe Haldeman, not just an artistic genius, but a white male Vietnam draft survivor, an unchallenged pinnacle of manly heterosexuality, who reached out across oceans decades, and countless lives lost, to ask "who gives a shit if you COULD change, when they SHOULD?" 3 decades later, they're still screaming for blood, and he's still right. And I'm the literally the only queer I ever met who NEVER let them make me hate myself. Does the real man or his avatar think I'm weird? Maybe. Do I give one atom of shit? Nope. Because even if he did, even if he still does, I like weird. I AM weird. Weird is good. I know that, and I've never doubted it, because Joe Haldeman thought it was important enough to repeatedly interrupt his own unchallenged masterpiece screaming it from the rooftops so loudly that fifty years of pure, uninterrupted hatred couldn't drown him out. So yeah, I'll say your interpretation of his argument was wrong. No shade, though - at the very least, I think we can all agree that it's an unmitigated good that he's FINALLY starting to sound a bit dated on the subject, yeah? Thanks again for giving him (most of) his well earned flowers. ❤️
It is absurd to think that the creation of one weapon would bar the creation of another; inversely, it is also absurd to think that the destruction of one weapon would bar the creation of others... it's the worst catch-22 of all human warfare (and I'd assume "alien" warfare, as well). If we suddenly quit after developing our first nuclear weapons, we would be living in a vastly different world, under the shadow of whoever chose to continue developing those weapons. If we had destroyed our nuclear weapons, someone else would have developed their own in secret. There's no outcome where we "win"; there's no world (past or future) where weapons stop being built or stop being "useful". By the time Eisenhower could give that warning, the arms race was already in full swing, and we have only continued to move towards militarization and "defense" spending ever since. Where there's blood, there's money to be made, unfortunately.
@@RememberTheDuckHell, the fast pace of the arms race began back in the industrial revolution, and to a slower extent, the beginning of life on Earth. There was nothing Eisenhower could do.
As a gay, closeted high-schooler, this more correct reading of the sexual politics of the book were lost on me due to me finding gay people and myself just as weird and alienating. Nevertheless, the fact that it was a personal reaction based on what Mandela was used to as opposed to moral condemnation helped matters immensely.
Detroit Become Human by David Cage is one of my all-time favorite video games 🎮 and it’s all about Androids going rogue or becoming “Deviant”. And I wish it would’ve made some strong parallels to how we humans can see other human variants behaviors as deviating from what nature intended. Like homosexuality for example.
As a gay guy... when you reach the point about how this book weirdly obsess about clarifying his straightness, I laugh out loud. It happens, especially when homosexuality is just getting certain exposure and acceptance. Decades ago I heard a story about a gay guy whom a co-worker (whom apparently wasn't a looker) found out, and made the gesture of saying "I just want you to know that I am fine with you being, but I am straight." with the appreciative reply follow by "Just because I am gay, doesn't mean I am into every guy." There's just a period of time when people just didn't understand what being gay means, what it means for the LGBT movement.
Well, huh. I just got done paying a small novel about how completely contradicted that take is by my own experience as a bi trans man. My assumption was generational divide.... I don't want to get any closer to the "you're younger so you're wrong" trope (especially without even appearance for support). ... But I will ask if you know what "don't touch that dial" means, lol 😉
When I came back from Afghanistan, at 3am I flew into Boston and was greeted by a group of Vietnam vets saluting and shaking our hands. These vets told us they wanted to make sure no soldier came home ungreeted like they were. It made me cry then and it makes me cry now. Edit: apparently my story is controversial. No I don't agree with everything that happened in Afghanistan, I joined as a medic to help people and that's what I did. I have love in my heart for every race and religion anyone who ended up on my table was treated to the best of my abilities. I am a single human who's belief can and did disagree with my government. I shared this story because I thought it was relevant to the topic of the video. You want to try to hold me accountable for my government's position. I suppose that's your prerogative or you could ask questions and I will share my honest opinion and feelings about my time and experiences.
You landed at a civilian airport when coming back from Afghanistan? Would have thought military personnel (which is implied in your post) would have landed at a military facility?
@@vashranoidHe probably went on leave after deployment. I know I would take any chance of leave as soon as I could
@@vashranoidit’s very common for US military personnel to take civilian flights to and from war zones. Sometimes you get a military flight sometimes not. Depends on a lot of variables.
Wow, that was awesome of them!! I thank you for your service my friend. I served in Bosnia w/a French NATO unit. I understand how these Vietnam Veterans feel being forgotten,or worse. I hope someday that governments learn some lessons, but that’s just wishful thinking 😂
Well, so far on our planet biology has been shown to have a very hard time changing. Thank goodness. Of course I have no idea what may come, but i do know that im not helping create that tower of Babel!!!!
Fry: "I heard one time you single-handedly defeated a horde of rampaging somethings in the something something system"
Brannigan: "Killbots? A trifle. It was simply a matter of outsmarting them."
Fry: "Wow, I never would've thought of that."
Brannigan: "You see, killbots have a preset kill limit. Knowing their weakness, I sent wave after wave of my own men at them until they reached their limit and shut down. Kif, show them the medal I won."
Peter turbo moment
Kif: 《sigh》
Must've been a British officer
Sounds like a politician
Wow, nobody here seems to recognize that Zapp Brannigan reference, except for swiftmatic.
There was a serious brain drain too. Soldiers needed to be smarter due to the conditions of a war in space. Our smartest sent off to die.
Yep.
Only those with high IQ got drafted, if I remember right.
IQ isn't real and is just a remnant of phrenology. everyone is capable of "becoming intelligent" when they have access to education, though others will excel in specific fields. this reads more like a society shifting towards funding a war rather than investing in their members education and well being. something we should all be extremely familiar with.
@ScribeOfAcadia do they hate you or the empire that has subjected them to war, economic disparity and the destruction of their autonomy?? we should fund each other's well being because we are all human, and we all deserve food and shelter. but I mean if you're admitting that you already hate them for not being like you, we know there's no reasoning with you.
@@alanpennie8013 being a former military recruiter, I can vouch for that, Friend! However, suggest that your google "McNamara's Morons" for a rather interesting and possibly disturbing footnote about the draft during the Viet Nam War.
@@needy3535 I don't hate you until you start spewing commie gibsmedat drivel.
Little tidbit is Heinlein loved reading the Forever War and personally congratulated Haldeman receiving his Nebula award.
Heinlein?
@@REHANKHAN-en5zn Robert Heinlein, the author of Starship Troopers, the book to which The Forever War was a response.
Didn't know that, thanks!
If I had to give 3 books for ppl to read, to understand war properly is:
Starship Troopers, Heinlein.
Forever War, Haldeman.
Regeneration, Barker.
3 different perspectives. And a bonus mention to Forever Peace.
Haldeman also said getting this congratulations was more important to him than the Neubla award itself, both brilliant Sci-fi authors 👾👽
@@CliffdogAlso two men who were veterans of vastly different wars. In short, I wonder what future scifi authors who experienced GWOT will write for military scifi.
Actually, we in the industrial complex prefer the term "Sustainable War" as it is more accurate to our long-term goals.
Nice!
Actually, we who fight your sustainable wars prefer to call you guys "capitalists".
"No such thing as a sustainable war, it's a lie we don't believe anymore" 🎶🎶
Difference is that in sicialistic kommunist countries can’t buy anything for you pay because there are no products
@@Hat_With_A_Hat_On the difference is the quality of life. When the economy is centred arround humans instead of capital, the average standard of living is much higher.
"War is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope." -Smedley Butler
Too bad no one in these cdomments seems to understand that and are praising American soldiers aka, war criminals that mass unalive civilians in wars for profit.
@yourt00bz Not all of us care to view great people through authoritarian lenses. I'm sorry that you're so attached to identify with grades others have made for others.... Good day.
Edit: And I saw some of your other comments, I'm glad you're privy to the agenda, however, why not just state this without attacking me? If you see the real agenda, it's to keep us fighting and attacking each other based on a CLASS system. It matters not ones origin, as we all come from a great and wonderful mysterious place... Don't shoot the messenger bro, we're on the same side. Be well.
War Is a necessary evil,,the wounds maybe deep,,but war slingshots technology,, Wether ce GPS of chemotherapy are the product of war
I agree with both of you to a degree, but side with the "his rank adds weight" but that may be my prior service bias.
"the only think we learn from history, that men refuse to learn from history"...
I am a native Vietnamese with family and relatives from both sides of the civil war, and have experienced life both in Vietnam where I grew up and in the US. I read The Forever War during a period of great but also traumatic emotional development. I can relate in an odd way to the main character of this book, and by extension Haldeman himself. Great read, i always revisit the book once a year.
P.s. I did not grow up during wartime, my parents were children in the waning years of the war. However the impact of the war was still felt in someway by children of that generation. Some families, from both sides, came out of it worse than others. And some children have inherited more inter-generational trauma than others.
I agree, you don't need to grow up in a war torn nation to experience the psychological side effects. If anything children of parents who experienced war suffer as well. I think that's the real insidious nature of war is that once it's over, it's never really over for people who've lived it. It takes a lot of work from both mental health practitioners and from the patients themselves to even remotely recover from it.
@@johnrivers3813yes I fully agree. Unfortunately, mental health service and professionals were not available for my parents, and currently remain limited. Mental health issues in my home country carry a stigma, and people, older folks especially, carry emotional wounds that never heal because they think themselves strong and therefore refuse mental health care, and look down upon those who seek it. I love my parents, but it remains true that I've had to seek therapy and essentially heal on my own and with the help of friends, away from my family.
Great comment. And youre right, trauma experienced by parents is quite often counter transferred to siblings unconsciously.
Yeah it is interesting, how trauma often has a more profound effect on the children of the victims, than it even has on the victims themselves.
The UK did a study in the years after 9/11 and the tube attacks, trying to find which biographical traits, or combinations of which predict who will become a terrorist.
It was a waste of effort mostly, but they found just one trait that had any significant correlation, and that was being the child of refugees.
While it is still rare even for that demographic for it to grow so far, they found that children who grow up seeing their parents discriminated against by the society in which they live, will often just grow up to see that society as being fundamentally evil. And as such, deserving destruction.
Also and entirely separately, you can Google sometime, "what are the three kinds of imprinting humans do?"
Humans do very little imprinting, we imprint on our family, men alone imprint on their ideal mate, and everyone also does "limbic imprinting."
Limbic imprinting is, during the period of time when you are a nursing baby, you will imprint on your mother's (or whichever woman nurses you) sympathetic tone. Your body's alarm response will feel hers, and grow to match it. Your baseline anxiety level, for all your life, will be whatever your mother's anxiety/fear level was, during the first few months in which she nursed you.
It doesn't seem to make much sense for it to work this way for humans, but it greatly increases the chance of survival to adulthood for babies of low-status apes.
But yeah, it means if your mom is traumatized whenever she is 19 and nursing you with a genocide playing out in the background, you are going to be sympathetically tuned like that, like she is in that moment, for all your years.
I worked in VN from 2008 to 2012. I was dating a girl from Da Lat and we went to visit her family there, we worked in HCMC. We were walking downtown. It’s a pretty town. I was telling her how I didn’t have a car in High School but my friends did. And she sincerely said aww that’s hard. Then we passed a building in the town square and she told me that was where her and her mother and her sister and her would walk to daily to get a ration of rice. Their house was easily over a mile away. It would have been in the mid 1980s when she was a kid and around the time I was in High School. I felt an inch tall complaining about that stuff. Cringe! I told her that she said she hadn’t even thought of it.
I served in Bosnia . Alienation affects most soldiers to some degree.
I am forever stuck in 1997.
It must be horrible to have to listen to Barbie Girl over and over again.
For me, 2010.
Sounds like you are rightfully guilty over participating in a war you had no business in
@@loganyoutube5418there are few statements/opinions quite as ignorant as yours. have you ever served? have you asked why this person served? have you thought about criticizing their government instead of them? perhaps they were a defender rather than an offender. i’m anti-war myself, but what you said isn’t how you go about talking about it.
I wish you all the best, youll feel better the more you seek help. I know that it can be so exhausting and expensive, but it’s worth in order to feel good. Have a great day :)
"In the grim Darkness of the far future, there is only war."
"And blood, lots of blood. Matter of a fact, you might say that's all there is.
There is the blood, and there is nothing else"
@@KalousTheGuy don't forget the skulls for the skull throne.
IS THAT A COMPLAINT? I THINK WE HAVE A HERETIC
So what you expect me not to go out of my way to random worlds to extinguish Xenos? That's some first rate Heresy and the Inquisition has been notified
Well, id adjust that statement to say that war is one of the only certainties, for us anyway...
Haldeman's character became a "regular" due to a total lack of ability to reintegrate. Most of my generation who served (I just turned 75) pulled one tour of duty and then took the dive back into society...with mixed results. I turned 21 a month after my enlistment in the Corps up. I looked 14... Entering college was an adjustment in the Fall of 1970... Not a "hostile" campus environment...but alien for all that... The people who graduated from high school in the Spring of 1970 and moved directly to college very different from so many who graduated in 1967.
.
In 1965 a Marine infantry squad leader (Sgt.) might have been 24 or 25... In 1969 he might be 19 or even 18. War not only inflates the currency...but also the leadership. The Corps went from 170,000 in 1965 to 300,000 in 1968. "War is boyish...and is fought by boys..." Herman Melville YP
Man I felt this shit. I started running a division of 15 nuclear trained machinist mates on a submarine when I was 22. It's incredible the amount of responsibility that can be loaded onto young, and inexperienced men.
You old soldiers never miss a chance to talk about your days of service like they were your high school football glory days. You were a heel for a government that did not and still does not care about you. You can rationalize it any way that you want, but just call it like it is: you’re a bootlicker. In a different time and place, you would have been one of the guys on trial at Nuremberg.
The Forever War has always been my favorite SF novel. I'm also fortunate enough to have had Joe Haldeman as a professor during the years he taught writing at MIT. A great book, and a great man. Haldeman fun fact: after having been wounded twice in Viet Nam, he was shot again in Florida while riding a bike along the highway.
That must have been such a privilege.
The Forever War remains one of my favourites. And Forever Peace was even better.
Thanx for the additional fun fact in your comment. I have a friend who grew up in Florida and really hates the place. He's going to enjoy hearing a reminder of why he'll never ever set foot in that state again.
@@DicePunk haven't slept, at first thought you were saying 'That must have been such a privilege.' about him getting shot in Florida
Hey, should I not watch the video? Should I go read the book? I barely watched the video and the book has peaked my interest.
@@bear3616yes read the book then watch the video after
Thanks! I really appreciate you highlighting this book, one of the best examples of the genre.
Sexuality themes aside, Forever War suddenly reminded me of one of my favorite (and first) sci-fi universes: Battletech. The setting itself is designed to perpetuate war and alienation as a theme which crops us like weeds in every aspect from the novels to the games. Humans merge with machines to become gods, nation states form, split and cannibalize each other like a forest of bacteria under a microscope. In at least one story arc, the descendants of a great war hero self-isolate to avoid being caught in a pending series of civil wars, only to then return to the setting hundreds of years later as a techno-eugenics cult with bizarre customs hell-bent on reconquering the Earth. Who needs aliens when humanity does a splendid job of making aliens of itself?
Sounds similar to the story of the game Horizon Forbidden West. Wonder if the devs got inspiration from Battletech now
The phone company doesn't f@%k around.
@@davestier6247 The phone company are also weirdos
@@bitterlilraccoon you're not wrong
As different as humanity will be in a thousand years, imagine what Florida Man will evolve into
The Forever War is a timeless classic. It made more of an impact on me than any other sci-fi I ever read as a boy. I was thinking about it for years.
Glad to see Joe Haldeman getting coverage on this channel. One of the first sci-fi writers I read, and still one of my favorites. A gritty, brutal, cynical take on war.
I first read this in the early 80's. My brother was a big scifi/fantasy reader and first handed me Starship Trooper. I thought it was great and then he handed me Forever War afterwards. Forever War blew me away. I enjoyed Starship Trooper, but saw how shallow it was compared to Forever War. It was my first encounter with time dilation. I loved this concept in science fiction.
I loved the Forever War. It was my first introduction to time dilation, too (and B-theory of time). It hurt my brain to understand it at first, but when I finally could grasp the ideas behind special relativity, it changed my perspective of time and my place in it. Got me interested in understanding physics (at least a layman's understanding, anyway). The book was great, though. Didn't really enjoy the sequel anywhere near as much, but got through them.
I also loved Forever War. That and Marsbound are still my favorite scifi stories. Really stuck with me as a 17yo. I'd never read anything quite like it.
Thank you ,as always, for your insight and analysis. As a Vietnam Vet, after I got home I was adrift and a stranger in my own country. I managed to finish a degree then left to work overseas, for most of my life.
I think it can be hard for some of us to really understand how radical some of these ideas were, because of how obvious they are to us. Yes, TFW's handling off sexuality is crude, awkward, and ultimately selfdefeating. But the simple fact that it wasn't "gay=bad" was radical for its time. We should also try to keep in mind that the audience he was writing for wasn't used to this message, and may have needed to have it repeated, just to be able to hear it.
I think that also goes to prove some of what the book has to say about alienation. It wasn't written that long ago in historical terms. Yet here we are alienated from it because of a rapidly changing culture and someone from them transported to now wouldn't know what to think.
@@bentuovila5296 the book makes the only honest observation anyone can make about the sexual mores of other generations. Unless you believe we, by grace of god, are living during the one moment in history when sexual morality has been perfected, you have to conclude that everyone who ever moralised or passed judgement about such things is full of shit.
@@tarnetskyggei dunno about that but i can say thing right now aren't natural as most of the world has SUB replacement birth rates.
I read a twinge of shame in how mandala was going on and on and i just thought "Joe fucked either a ladyboy or a trench buddy and he felt real bad about it afterwards"
Always interesting to find a video which hasn't been out long enough for someone to have watched the entire thing yet
even if they watched it at 2x speed lol
As a time traveler, I find this comment offensive.
@moosiemoose1337 at least you can snipe from the past, leaving a mystery poo in his loo oughta do
And yet there's 85 comments nonetheless. As for me I'm 1:13 in and it was about time.
35 hours of video uploaded to this god forsaken cesspit a day
(this channels alright tho)
i owe you gratitude for turning me onto FOUNDATION, i was great , and the 3 BODY P. another great suggestion, i am sure this will be, thank you
This book isn't cited as often as Starship Troopers in how it influenced HellDivers II, but I feel like it was almost as influential in the game's story's/world's creation.
Just as was the case with ST, some HD players don't realise it's satire and take it as a genuine endorsement of their facist views
@@ThommyofThennI’ve literally never encountered a single person who has the viewpoint but i’ve seen a dozen who believe that these non-existant people exist lmao.
@@thebigenchilada678 I've seen it. They're real and the kinds of people easily swayed by propaganda
@@thebigenchilada678 you know every person who has ever existed or might possibly. Very cool big guy!
@@ThommyofThenn i’m almost certain you were trolled into believing this.
You’re telling me that someone looked at helldivers 2’s trailer and said “yup, so true!” As if the satirical bug killing game is in any way remotely applicable to their own lives or views.
Where exactly do you encounter these people?
Quinn, this video was BEYOND Phenomenal. You really nailed the theme of the book and what veterans go through and the crushing reality of our future. Bravo sir.
As a vet with 32yrs of service, thank you. This was an excellent analogy.
Thanks for your service
I second this coment@@Stephaneforero
Danke!
I read this book when I was 14 and it had a great impact on me.
It's the reason I never joined the military, and why I found that physics and philosophy can be bed fellows in fiction.
Thanks!
Finally, I'm so excited you are finally covering this gem!
If this is your research, I find it thoroughly impressive, Sir. Something that I hope to emulate. I am largely self-taught because I find it difficult to learn in a classroom environment. I have found out recently that it was exacerbated by ignorance of my recently confirmed autism. So, at 65 years old, I hope to improve my abilities as a writer, composer and researcher by studying how people such as yourself do your work since emulation has been the main process I've used to educate myself. i am quite sure after you read this, you'll dismiss me as some wacko. That's quite alright, I am used to it. Thank you very much for sharing your fantastic insight once again.
Why would anyone think you're a wacko? It sounds like you wear this self-imposed badge with honor? Or do you want to be called a wacko? It's strange.
@@Gavriloprincepyeah it IS a badge of honor but us autists do not expect you to understand
I do the same to improve myself!
Subscribed. Make something!
@@Gavriloprincep have you ever heard the phrase, "Never have a battle of wits with an unarmed person?"
Excellent review as always Quinn.
I read this book, of all ironic places, when I was deployed in Iraq in 2016.
I found this in a drawer of a desk at our company headquarters and read it over the course of two days and loved it. I had no idea that Haldermann was a veteran himself but I can certainly see it now in his writings. i also didn't know the inspiration for the book was the Vietnam war, but it is clear as day to me now.
Thank you for reviewing this. Keep up the good work man!
It definitely reads like the writing of a vet, with exchanges like,
"It's so sneaky".
"It's so army."
@@alanpennie8013 That, and just the way he writes in the beginning when the characters are going through training. I read this and even then I thought this had to either be written by a veteran, or someone who knows veterans.
Cannot begin to tell you how much my week needed an injection of intelligent and thought-provoking content. Excellent video as always. Yours is my most anticipated channel on TH-cam.
Knocked it out the park with this one. The critique was flawless; Besides your dune stuff, my favorite yet.
I’m so glad you are covering this! Honestly this is one of my most favorite books of all time! I read this in highschool and I still think about it all the time!
Multiple time GWOT veteran. I related to this after so many deployments. The war had no end in sight and we kept being sent right back. The GWOT was the Forever War.
Terrorism is an idea, you can't fight an idea, it doesn't have armies or navies, it lives in the minds of the alienated, and can pop up anywhere you get enough alienated men, and such a war can truly be fought forever, since every heart and mind cannot be won.
What is GWOT?
@@mx-hx war on terror
Global War on Terror, or “GWOT,” but also used to describe diplomatic, financial, and other actions taken to deny financing or safe harbor to terrorists. This also included operations in the greater Middle East including Afghanistan and Iraq, also Africa and the Philippines.
You would do well to put quotes on "terrorists".
Hey, Quinn! Just want to say that your Dune videos helped me out of a rut. With all the horrible news coming out of Gaza/Palestine, I needed something to take my mind off things here on Terra. I binged them all (and even rewatched them, what a dense and imaginative world). A friend is a big fan of the series, but she never mentioned how weird it is, like truly. It's an amazing world and I thank you for covering it with so much love and care.
Thank you for covering one of my favorite novels!
Years ago, it took about a second reading to realize that the entire book is from a first-person point of view of William. No conversations or scenes, other than inner dialogue, outside of the main character. A lot of work for the lead if ever made into a movie...
On the topic of sci-fi novels written from the non-human perspective: There are several I can think of: Nor Crystal Tears, by Alan Dean Foster. This is part of his Commonwealth novel series, and tells the story of the foundation of the Humanx Commonwealth from the perspective of a Thranx, an insectoid alien. There is also The Genocidal Healer, told from the perspective of a non-human doctor dealing with the guilt of failing to correctly diagnose and treat a planetary plague. This is one of Alan E. Nourse's Sector General series. The author C.J. Cherryh has written several series told mostly from the perspective of non-humans. There is the Faded Sun Trilogy, told from the perspective of a Mri, one of a species of warriors honor-bound to serve another species, the Regul. And her Chanur series is told primarily from the perspective of a hani ship captain, caught in a conflict between the humans, the kif, and the knnn.
Now, one question is, are these alien perspectives alien enough? That, I believe, is up to the reader to decide...
And now to find my copy of "Nor Crystal Tears" and reread it.
I have spent entire afternoons watching your Dune videos. Your channel is fantastic.
Absolutely agree. Quality content and delivery. Please keep going, Quinn!
I randomly looked up Revelation Space when thinking about the Ultras and got through your vid on the Dawn War before i realized I'd watched or listened to ALL your stuff on ASoIaF and Dune years ago. I'm really glad you're doing well at this, your sharp perception and ability to compile oculted themes in these works really impressed me and after binging 4 of your vids from the past year, the hunger to finish The Sprawl and Inhibitor trilogies reawakens.
I just noticed that the description has an actual summary of the video! I wish more people used the description for summaries rather than purely ads. Definitely one of those smaller things that I really appreciate about your work but didn't immediately notice.
I appreciate that you took the time to do a sort of lit review and establish context before your breakdown, top quality as always, Quinn!
Marvano’s illustrations for the graphic novel version of The Forever War add visceral horror to the story.
The series sits with pride on my shelf!
Great book. One of my favorites!
Thanks for covering this.
I want to become a writer and I noticed that The Forever War was one inspiration for my sci-fi novel. The feeling of alienation takes place at the start of the plot and the urge to leave earth is what causes the main characters to end up in a warzone, on the wrong side of a pointless war.
Thank you for finally covering this series. It has been one of my favorite series for decades, and one I have often recommended to young sci-fi readers.
Thou Art Awesome, Quinn. Thank you.
The appetite for allegory is not to be underestimated.
I have been following your stuff since the beginning Quinn and your scholarship has gotten better and better. It was great to begin with.
Ever since i started watching this channel I have begun reading far more than I ever thought I would. It is bizarre how much resistance there seems to be to the concept of reading books, and once you break through that barrier it is like unlocking an almost endless archive of media that was hidden in plain sight.
One of my favorite books. Thanks for doing a video for this one, Quinn.
I love your channel, and must congratulate you for its quality and detail. Thank you.
You're back! Hooray!
This is the most amazing video you have ever done. Speculative fiction is always social commentary, and for you to connect these books to such relevant history is a supreme accomplishment. You really take your rightful place as a significant public intellectual with this one. Bravo sir! Encore!
I really like the section at the beginning of the video where you go over some of the history of science fiction. A whole video on the topic would be super interesting to watch!
You should be proud of this review. Perfect insight along with the understanding of where Haldeman was at the time, the political climate when he was writing it and meshing it seamlessly and keeping it streamlined.
This is up there with your work on Dune.
This was a great book! glad to see you are covering it. One thing I love is just how different society becomes between each mission the guy goes on, so much to the point where he decides "well this place sucks, might as well go back out again" haha.
As someone who is getting back into reading, discovering your channel has been a godsend. Keep up the great work and please have more book recommendations. Im slowly watching through your vids and have lots of books on my readlist now.
at 6:43 I have to pause and come back at a later date. First, I'm a fan of yours Quinn. So I'll take your word that this book is good. Second, I'm an Iraq war vet. I'll have to get this book, read it, then come back and watch the rest of your video.
A vet myself, I picked this book up at the MWR library towards the end of my deployment. Interestingly enough, I read Starship Troopers at the beginning of my deployment. I highly recommend The Forever War as well.
A thorough synopsis as usual. Great video.
A beautiful endorsement Mr. Quinn. I have read these on deployment during my time in the Navy along with other great books like Heinlein's Starship Troopers and Frank Herbert's Dune series. Your recommendations are always spot on.
Quinn's consistency in delivering high quality content is amazing. He's inspired me to read many sci-fi novels.
Thx, Quinn!
Your commentary is so insightful and interesting. Thank you for your videos
I am so glad this video has been made! I am not a total Sci-Fi buff apart from Dune and Star Trek, but I listened to the Audiobook of "Forever War" a couple of years ago and I was instantly fascinated. "Forever War" is such an intelligent, sensitive and sensible book, great literature in general, I loved it so much and I am very happy that you got around talking about it.
Whaaaaat!
History by Quinn?
Well done! You can really feel the 70s social concepts in Haldemans work....
I’m so happy to see you cover forever war. I love this book.
I don’t share the perspective that its social themes are dated.
But, to me, I think that the criticism would more aptly be that it seems uncharacteristically without modern euphemism, it can be curt, and, in current non-descriptive parlance, “problematic”.
I do, however, think that the view and perspective attributing a “dated” nature, in a sci-fi fan’s review-is a novelty of the last 5 years.
This is a minor gripe. I love your videos and really enjoy your views and tellings!
Man, I'm a Sci-Fi fan since my childhood and a Dune fan since my 20s, but your channel has really fired me up about Sci-Fi in general. Thanks to you I read Children of Time. A great novel, so original. And a challenging read because of my fear of spiders.
I really think you should do a video about Cli-Fi. The Ministry For The Future of Kim Stanley Robinson is a prime example.
I'm in the middle of Ministry for the Future now. It would be amazing to hear Quinn's take on the book, and I would love to see an adaptation.
Thank you for a solid review and analysis. Always a good to see some new Quinn videos on anything
The Graphic novel adaption of the book by Marvano (NBM Publishing - also in collaboration with Joe Haldeman) is worth getting and reading :)
"Wait a minute... you mean that... on board... everyone on the ship is homosexual?"
The graphic novel is fantastic
Fantastic video to say the least. You didn't waste a single word. Well done
0:16 I thought uncle Ruckus was about to pop out of nowhere hahahaha
Well well well...
I'm gonna need an order of more 40 min + videos from you Quinn. Just too good to listen to you talk about these books you read and your thoughts on them too. Great work. Interesting book also.
Vernor Vinge's "A Deepness in the Sky" from 1999 also follows a society of spider people. His novel "A Fire Upon the Deep" 1992 (same series) explores a medieval society of distributed intellects for whom one 'person' is distributed across several creatures in a pack. I highly recommend Vernor Vinge's Zones of Thought series for its exploration of both time dilation at sub-FTL travel and his exploration of how non-human intelligences might think and act.
Yep, thats the first one that came to mind for me as well. Been decades since i read it so the specific plot is long lost in time but it remains in my memory as both thought provoking and easy and pleasant to read
Rainbows End is my favorite book of his.
Another great video Quinn! It's cool that these will live forever online.
My older sibling was killed in Vietnam which lead to me joining the military. After I got out I was struggling with the return to civilian life and being a dad. At one point my pregnant wife was hospitalized and I found John Steakley's Armor in a waiting room. Being a post Vietnam era book it was a direct opposite to Starship Troopers. It was re-aligned my thinking with things I was struggling with at the time.
Welcome home my man. I'm glad you got the happy ending (I hope).
Thank you, Quinn, for opening this allegory to our times.
Very nicely done.
Kudos.
This channel is the best, literally keeps me sane listening at work to get thru mind numbing days.
I love this book!!! I’ve read it 4 times already and I continuously draw similarities between the story and the characters with myself and my 26 year career in the Army. Quinn, thank you for taking time to truly break this book down as you did/do with DUNE!!! Outstanding job
"in the future everyone is gay"
The guy almost had it in 1973.
If he had said "in the future everything is gay" then he would be correct...
Good to see you again. This has been a favourite book since it came out. Happy to see it getting some love.
Great video. Future Shock, as coined by Alvin Toffler, is definitely a major theme as well
Even dropped by name, "but in a physical sense". Williams captain said it with that first encounter with taurans in the collapsar
I've really enjoyed watching your videos, thank you for making them.
Thanks for the new Vid Quinn. Just started reading book 8 of The Culture by Ian M Banks and I’m sad to be approaching the end of the series.
I’m on my third go through the series. Never gets old.
What a great video! Thank you so much Quinn's Ideas!
Once you have Starship Troopers and The Forever war covered, the next steps are The Eternity Brigade and John Steakley’s Armor.
Armor has been a favorite of mine for ages, I bought several copies when I was in the Army because I'd loan it out and either me or the guy who had it would PCS, lol.
@@eloquentsarcasm yup, Armour is brilliant, it just keeps getting better and more interesting as uut progresses
Quinn’s ideas is TH-cam’s best content creator hands down!🙌🙌
As a straight dude I’ve taken the homosexuality topic as a clear indicator that it goes both ways. A straight man in a gay world is no different than a gay man in a straight world. The straight man can’t change his sexuality to match the gay world in the same way a gay man can’t change his sexuality in a straight world. Charlie’s ability to change to straight is no different than a gay man pretending to be straight can easily choose his homosexuality to express in a world that it is acceptable. The book was written when homosexuals were genuinely despised by a large portion of the world.
*Western world.
It’s like this, Charlie was always straight but the governments influence kind of forced him to act and appear as a homosexual. When given an o to be his genuine self he chooses to be what he always was. The same way gay men who once had to pretend to be straight to conform to society can now “reveal” and live as their genuine self. It always seemed as a means of puttin the predominately straight reader into the homosexuals shoes of the time the book was written. Reading it as a teen boy in the 80s it was an eye opener on how gays must have felt at the time. Even then homosexuality was still seen as odd or even unacceptable.
For anyone who loves science fiction you make amazing videos. You're really great at communicating how interesting and how deep are all these cool science fiction stories really are. All the best man keep up the great work.
One aspect not mentioned is that Mandela had an IQ160, as it was deemed that weapons systems by then were so complex, that they required geniuses to use them. And only all candidates of IQ 160 were conscripted to this war.... no US Senators sons here.. Paul Hardcastle "19" says it all, like this book.....
My man, I really appreciate your mind and intellect. I love these titles! I' ve read many of these and appreciate being introduced to more!
I feel that "Total Blackout" is also relevant, here. The hanging, ghoulish realities and costs of war are really on display in that one. It's not sci-fi, but...well, it's not entirely NOT...
Quinn. Thank you for this in depth analysis. I've read the book a couple of times and on my travels, have listened to the audio book. You've brought several things here to my attention that I hadn't considered over the years.
You should check out The Black Company. Its a fantasy series but similar in a way to Forever War. A vet writing about things he knows, but it follows a mercenary company working for the evil empire.
The Black Company is great, but I would never recommend it over or before Malazan Book of the Fallen.
Any other recommendations in a similar genre/theme?
@@sayrebonifield4663 malazan is great if u dont want to know whats going on lol
@@sayrebonifield4663I would every day of the week.
It’s been a minute and, GOD, I’ve missed these videos. Always amazing perspective and insight.
I didn't see "Starship Troopers" as glorifying the military. It's intention was to propose an answer to a question, which was "How can a democracy function when its citizens vote for their own interests to the exclusion of the shared interests of everybody?". I think this is still a cogent question, though I'm not sure that the answer presented by "Starship Troopers" is the right one.
I really appreciate your perspective on the sexuality components of "The Forever War". I thought it was weird, but as a straight guy, I didn't have the experiences necessary to pick it apart in that way.
I suspect that homosexuality is actually an adaptive behavior, honestly. I have some guesses as to why, but I'm eagerly waiting for Bret Weinstein to detail the hypotheses he has about it because I'm sure his background as an evolutionary biologist renders his hypothesis far more worthy of testing than my guesses.
Look at it from another perspective. Starship Troopers is no utopy, but a dystopy.
Heinlein very often stressed he greatly values freedom and individuality and detests Soviet communism. Yet the teachers use the same arguments why this society was "scientifically proven" the best. That's a core Soviet propaganda point.
Heinlein shows what will happen if in a society, people no longer care for the common duties and obligations. The world isn't an "answer" to "how should democracy look like", but a cautionary tale: "this is how democracy WILL look like if we come across an existential threat unprepared".
And suddenly, all the one-dimensionality of the characters, all the dubious choices up to war crimes, everything falls into place. The Arachnids are presented as un-changing, there IS no dialogue or compromise with them - as far as the government, authoritarian because of public political disinterest, knows. To survive, those willing to defend humanity suddenly get all the bargaining power and form a caste - exclusionary, as "those unable to serve in the military" (like Heinlein IRL) are used for pharmaceutical testing - and suddenly have the exclusive monopoly on political power.
Heinlein calls to not let it come to that, to shoulder the burden of defense mutually and solidarily together.
@@enysuntra1347 - That's a very interesting idea. I hadn't thought about it from that perspective. But it does make a lot of sense as a perspective on the book.
I think the book makes a lot of people uncomfortable partly because of the idea it proposes, the idea that citizens do have some obligation to be statesmen in the small. I don't think that idea is one a lot of people like to hear as the primary motivation because the fundamental basis of their politics is a selfish resentment of others. I suspect then that the obvious militarism becomes a target to discredit and distract from the main idea.
Your framing is a really excellent one from the perspective of getting people to engage with the main idea, regardless of whether it was Heinlein's intention or not.
I don’t know why you’d wait for the opinion of an idiot to form your views on homosexuality.
On ivermectin, Brett claimed that it was "a near-perfect COVID prophylactic". The imbecile didn’t get vaccinated, and instead claimed that ivermectin was a perfect cure to covid that was apparently only being withheld for the benefit of ‘big pharma’.
He was wronged back in the campus protest era, but like so many wronged he has pivoted into the realm of absurd conspiracy in response to his unfair treatment.
@@Omnifarious0 While Heinlein was sympathetic to the military, I read - in rereading, not the first time! - the militarism of Starship Troopers as a description what will happen. Servicemen now have a very good societal standing in the Ukraine, because they are those who defend the society. IMO this goes on steroids if the threat is as existential as the Arachnids.
The better conclusion is not "Starship Troopers bad because of militarism", but the question: "How can we avoid extreme militarism in a society that has to defend itself?" This question was prevalent at the dawn of the Cold War when Heinlein wrote Starship Troopers, and in February of 2022, it suddenly became very relevant again, especially if a Red Chinese invasion attempt on Taiwan is indeed a question of "when" and not "if".
@@enysuntra1347China will never be able to invade Taiwan without using nukes or using extreme amounts of blood and material.
The first thing they would have to do is build the world's largest navy. The United States has the current world's largest Navy, has 11 super carriers along with all the support and fleet ships needed to defend each of the carriers.
The Chinese have three regular carriers one of them is a Soviet Era ship. They are building a fourth ship but are decades away from being able to field anything close to the size and fighting power of the US Navy. Assuming the US Navy doesn't add to or even modernize the current fleet, then China would have a chance in a straight up fight.
Assuming thet get their naval assets in order , then China will have to frost train then concentrate their forces in preparation for an amphibious landing. It will need to be the largest one ever seen in human history, many times larger than what was put together for D-Day. China would then need to somehow trick all of the world's intelligence gathering apparatuses including satellite assets that can sit over China and watch. That China's very large concentration of troops and naval assets is not the prelude of an invasion.
Assuming China gets all of that done without preventive strikes disrupting the preparations. The Chinese Armada will then have to cross the Formosa Straight averaging 180 km from the mainland to the island it will take most of the day to get there.
It will be a day in hell for the Chinese Navy. As shore-based anti-ship missiles, naval and land-based aircraft, and of course scores of surface ships and submarines that had days if not weeks to get into the area, all light up the now target rich environment turning the bottom of the Formosa straight into a ship graveyard.
Assuming after a day of hell at sea for the Chinese Navy the battered armada didn't turn back and finally make landfall on Taiwan. An island that is either a mountainous or an urban environment. The most defender friendly environment man has found so far in warfare.
Top that off with an island population that has had military conscription for generations meaning almost the entire population males except for children know how to fight as a military.
While the bloody fighting is happening on the island the 180 km long supply line on the open ocean will be raided non stop. Forcing the Chinese troops to either find food ammunition and medical equipment locally or go without. When they go without long enough and they will no longer be a threat.
Then IF (super big if here) the Taiwanese Government were to fall to Chinese forces, there would still be generations of guerrilla warfare afterwards.
China and Taiwan are never going to be unified through warfare. Taiwan doesn't have the capability to take over China and China can only take over Taiwan if the rest of the world lets them. Even then it would cost so much in blood and equipment it would be a Pyrrhic Victory. Ultimately weakening the victors on the world stage and possibly even the fall of their governments from internal strife.
The only way China and Taiwan will ever unify is through willful diplomacy. Which is unlikely but not impossible.
Maaaannn, when you said Haldeman wow it as a response to Starship Troopers, I nearly embarrassed myself jumping in to "um ackshully" because I thought you were falling to note the military service!
The Forever War may be the singlemost (personally) influential book I ever read, by which I mean that it's the only book that really, truly changed who I became as an adult to any degree. Thanks for giving it the flowers it deserves, especially through such an eloquent exploration of themes I just didn't have the knowledge or development to fully appreciate.
... And I'm really glad that I left the preceding comment as soon as you proved me wrong, because now I'm going to do something totally new to me and tell you that your interpretation is fundamentally wrong, at least when it comes to the secondary message regarding sexuality. Kindly return the favor & hear me out anyway.
Mandela kept thinking about how he wasn't gay and couldn't be gay no matter how hard he tried because one day everyone was straight & he wasn't heterosexual, he was normal. Literally the next day from his perspective, up is down and black is white and he's, in his own words "a sexually deviant dinosaur" to the nice, normal who actually had to be trained to repress their anxiety about his perversion (with mixed success) and literally couldn't even speak to without advanced degrees in the equivalent of old English. And he still can't even repress his deviance, despite genuinely suffering because of it. Not as much as the war itself, of course... but without the war, he never would have lived to see it.
Yes, Charlie is able to easily decide to undergo medical treatment to be straight - treatment which was unavailable to Mandela, since it wasn't developed for centuries after he & Charlie shipped out on that last tour. Mandela spent that time coming to terms with his newfound minority status BECAUSE medical "correction" wasn't possible. Charlie never had to come to terms with anything except his own equally artificial belief that anything other than exclusive homosexuality is immoral & disgusting, even if it's an incredibly rude thing to say to one of the poor, unevolved dinosaurs the brass insisted on appointing to command positions based on seniority despite their equally inevitable incompetence. Plus Charlie was genetically engineered to be gay in the first place like literally every human from his own time, because population control was an issue that actually mattered, and nothing prevents accidental "mammalian" reproduction like universal abstinence from reproductive sex. And then Charlie made it home alive, only to find that the promised perfection of human genetic engineering had left him just another obsolete model, like Mandela. Unlike Mandela, he had the choice before he had the time, and he took it. One might even say he... transitioned. After both men tried sex with clones of his preferred gender & found it repulsive, agreeing that the human family just didn't include either of them anymore. Except for that tear jerker last line, but let's not spoil it for the new kids. YOU know, and so do I. ;)
But anyway, if that's not enough, contrast it with the depiction of sexuality in the 90s Mandela imagined, where the military solved the problem of women in the service degrading unit cohesion by commenting sexual rivalry amongst the boys (who will inevitably be boys): by requiring exactly 50% female recruitment so that there's always enough ass to go around, even assigning random partners each night to foster that same cohesion regardless of what (or whom) either of them might think about it. All heterosexual, of course. Mandela's not super enthusiastic about that.
Though to be fair, he is extremely entertained when the first batch of troops reaches the space station prepared as their main staging ground & the command staff "unleashed their men on our women, eager & compliant in accordance with military tradition (and law)."
Law. I won't insult you by explaining Joe Haldeman doesn't invoke military law to signal moral approval*, but I will argue that even if your understanding of that subject reflects the author's personal anxiety regarding his own sexuality, that scene - just the one line, really - is his only real attempt to *defend* it. He never made any attempt to sanitize heterosexual OR male sexual privilege, any more than he tried to hide that Mandela was pure without avatar. But the closest he ever came to any statement on the inherent meaning of his own orientation was to categorically and definitively state that the women are "eager" because it's literally a crime to withhold consent.
So that's my textual support, and I stand by my interpretation, which is one thing. Saying you're is wrong is another matter, but that's where I couldn't help some personal speculation... I'm pretty sure you're younger than I am. I'm positive that if you aren't queer, you're a LOT younger.
Apologies for the presumption, but it is relevant for what that's worth. When I first read The Forever War at the age of 12, it was 1993 (just a few years before Mandela's deployment to the front lines in 1997, remember) and I thought I was lesbian. I was wrong, not only because I realized I was ALSO attracted to men while still a teenager, but because I was a trans man according to the social paradigm shift that definitively asserted sex and gender are distinct bio-social phenomena more than a decade later.
Forgive me, but I cannot believe any queer, even one young enough to have survived the political heyday of "AIDS is God's cure for gay cancer" could think Haldeman's argument was that being gay is weird even if it is involuntary, or even that the book was "progressive for its time." The Forever War was where I learned the concept of orientation, miraculously before the people who are STILL screaming that people like me are just a bunch of sexual deviants choosing perversion as flimsy cover for predation. Joe Haldeman was the first person who told me they were full of shit. When the entire movement was doing better than any of us pariahs could hope by rallying to the "please stop killing us, we can't help being inferior," it was Joe Haldeman, not just an artistic genius, but a white male Vietnam draft survivor, an unchallenged pinnacle of manly heterosexuality, who reached out across oceans decades, and countless lives lost, to ask "who gives a shit if you COULD change, when they SHOULD?"
3 decades later, they're still screaming for blood, and he's still right. And I'm the literally the only queer I ever met who NEVER let them make me hate myself.
Does the real man or his avatar think I'm weird? Maybe. Do I give one atom of shit? Nope. Because even if he did, even if he still does, I like weird. I AM weird. Weird is good.
I know that, and I've never doubted it, because Joe Haldeman thought it was important enough to repeatedly interrupt his own unchallenged masterpiece screaming it from the rooftops so loudly that fifty years of pure, uninterrupted hatred couldn't drown him out.
So yeah, I'll say your interpretation of his argument was wrong. No shade, though - at the very least, I think we can all agree that it's an unmitigated good that he's FINALLY starting to sound a bit dated on the subject, yeah?
Thanks again for giving him (most of) his well earned flowers. ❤️
Why couldn't the whole world have heeded Eisenhower's warning? 😮
$$$
Because it wasn't a warning to everyone. To some it was opportunity.
It is absurd to think that the creation of one weapon would bar the creation of another; inversely, it is also absurd to think that the destruction of one weapon would bar the creation of others... it's the worst catch-22 of all human warfare (and I'd assume "alien" warfare, as well).
If we suddenly quit after developing our first nuclear weapons, we would be living in a vastly different world, under the shadow of whoever chose to continue developing those weapons. If we had destroyed our nuclear weapons, someone else would have developed their own in secret. There's no outcome where we "win"; there's no world (past or future) where weapons stop being built or stop being "useful".
By the time Eisenhower could give that warning, the arms race was already in full swing, and we have only continued to move towards militarization and "defense" spending ever since. Where there's blood, there's money to be made, unfortunately.
@@RememberTheDuckHell, the fast pace of the arms race began back in the industrial revolution, and to a slower extent, the beginning of life on Earth. There was nothing Eisenhower could do.
Because most people are busy praising war criminals, aka American soldiers.
Thank you for covering this book Quinn. This is one of my absolute favorite books. It's a superb story ahead of its time.
We've been waiting and it's finally here
You make me want to read again! Thank you so much quin ❤
As a gay, closeted high-schooler, this more correct reading of the sexual politics of the book were lost on me due to me finding gay people and myself just as weird and alienating. Nevertheless, the fact that it was a personal reaction based on what Mandela was used to as opposed to moral condemnation helped matters immensely.
Detroit Become Human by David Cage is one of my all-time favorite video games 🎮 and it’s all about Androids going rogue or becoming “Deviant”. And I wish it would’ve made some strong parallels to how we humans can see other human variants behaviors as deviating from what nature intended.
Like homosexuality for example.
Well done Quinn. I have been watching your videos for years and I always enjoy your reviews. Thank you for posting!!!
As a gay guy... when you reach the point about how this book weirdly obsess about clarifying his straightness, I laugh out loud. It happens, especially when homosexuality is just getting certain exposure and acceptance. Decades ago I heard a story about a gay guy whom a co-worker (whom apparently wasn't a looker) found out, and made the gesture of saying "I just want you to know that I am fine with you being, but I am straight." with the appreciative reply follow by "Just because I am gay, doesn't mean I am into every guy." There's just a period of time when people just didn't understand what being gay means, what it means for the LGBT movement.
Wtf are you on about, who gives a shit about LGBT stuff, this video is about the forever war
Well, huh. I just got done paying a small novel about how completely contradicted that take is by my own experience as a bi trans man. My assumption was generational divide.... I don't want to get any closer to the "you're younger so you're wrong" trope (especially without even appearance for support).
... But I will ask if you know what "don't touch that dial" means, lol 😉
@@biocapsule7311 Still is the case for some less well-off or more hardline countries, actually.
Which makes it all the funnier for me.