Joe Haldeman is one of the most acclaimed members of the post-Vietnam generation of American science fiction authors, making his debut in 1976 with the all-around classic The Forever War. Not that he’s rested on his laurels, winning several more Hugos, Nebulas and even a World Fantasy Award for the 1993 short story Graves and a new book about every year, but he doesn’t get mentioned much in the current top lists.
Old Twentieth is probably indicative of why that is. An enjoyable read, well-drawn protagonist and a twist for the ending, the bottom line is this was essentially a novella stretched to minimally acceptable novel length; if not for economic requirements this should have been 80-100 rather than 257 pages. Haldeman is capable of compositions that engage and groove but cannot expect us to accept repetitive virtual excursions to our own recent past that serve little narrative purpose. I suppose this is the other side of trilogyitis, that anything other than book-length works are rarely viable publishing projects.
Interspersed with the brief virtual reality visits, the main plot framework concerns the interstellar flight of 800 (or 1,000, I’m still not sure) survivors of a war forty years from now between the wealthy who can afford a new drug treatment conferring immortality and everyone else. The conflict ends when the putative immortals release an agent which kills everyone who hasn’t undergone the Becker-Cendrek Process within hours. The novel itself begins 200 years later, the horrors and hardships of the war’s aftermath are breezed through in a few words in the first chapter, and the flight is neither a panicky response nor a solution to anything except boredom and economic doldrums.
Faster than light travel is not part of Haldeman’s imagined future, though, and so the few lightyears’ flight will take 1,000 years with no solid prospects of a viable home at the destination or secure plan for return. Jacob Brewer was seven at the war’s beginning; he joins the expedition as chief virtuality engineer, responsible for the systems that provide the trip’s most desirable form of entertainment. Not that people lose themselves in the made up worlds since only four can participate at the same time and then for no more than 20 hours at a stretch. Something goes wrong inside, Manhattan in the 1930s smells just a bit off to Brewer and his fellow techs.
Tracking down the reason leads us to the denoument. Even with just a dozen pages left I couldn’t figure out how Haldeman was going to wrap things up. I believe that the technique he used is called deus ex machina.
not recommended
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