The Forever War by Joe Haldeman

I'd never read anything by Joe Haldeman before. But a week ago I was killing time browsing the (tiny) Sci-Fi section at Kramerbooks and it caught my eye. Three reasons I decided to get it: 1) it won the Nebula Award; 2) it won the Hugo Award; 3) it was written in 1974, which, to me, means it's got a better chance of being good than something written in 2004; and 4) it had a blurb by William Gibson on it saying it was a must-read. Okay, William.
 
It's fun, like all these sci-fi books have been. Plus it came with the (unadvertised) bonus of a goosebump-causing final paragraph. Although I'm more sentimental than most people so I can't guarantee that it'll do the same for anyone else.

The basic premise is as follows: Humans get into a War with some Aliens, called the Taurans (b/c they're first encountered in the Taurus constellation). Both Humans and Taurans have figured out how to use Black Holes, Wormholes, or Collapsars, as they're called in this book, to jump across huge swaths of Space. So there isn't technology to travel faster than light via simple spaceship engines--but collapsars make it possible. This brings Time Dilation (take a look at the wikipedia page if you're unfamiliar with the term) into play. The fights with the Taurans take place a few collapsar-jumps away from Earth. Hence: soldiers get drafted, they get put on spaceships, they jump through a few collapsars, they engage in violent conflict with a group of Taurans, the survivors jump back through the collapsars and return to Earth which, due to the time dilation, has aged, oh, say, 120 years, while the soldiers have been away for 3 months of Subjective Time. Hence, their families don't exist anymore, society has changed, etc, etc, but the war is still going on.

Haldeman takes this idea and works through just how this would work, and what it would mean, and he makes it Believable. The whole war effort is built around the reality that soldiers are constantly being sent out and returning from different time periods, requiring full updates of their existing Technology, History, Weapons and Cultural Orientation. Some of the Future Earths that he gives us brief tours of are entirely plausible. Also depressing, and amusing.

There's also a Love Story mixed in (with a minimum of Sappiness). And, being a product of 1974, there are plenty of allusions to the Vietnam War and the problems its veterans had when they returned home.