Recommendations
Books Like The Forever War
What to read after The Forever War by Joe Haldeman
If The Forever War's combination of hard military SF and the specific alienation of returning veterans — the relativistic time dilation that ages Earth decades between each deployment — left you wanting more military science fiction that uses the genre to examine what war does to people, these are the novels readers find next.
- 1Buy
Old Man's War
by John Scalzi
John Perry enlists in the army at 75, gets a young body, and fights humanity's wars against alien species. The most popular contemporary military SF novel — influenced by both The Forever War and Starship Troopers, and engaging with both in its plot and themes.
- 2Buy
Starship Troopers
by Robert A. Heinlein
A young man enlists in Earth's military forces and fights an alien insect species. Haldeman wrote The Forever War explicitly as a response to this novel — where Heinlein presents military service as ennobling, Haldeman presents it as dehumanizing. Reading both is reading a debate across two generations of military SF.
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All You Need Is Kill
by Hiroshi Sakurazaka
A soldier fighting alien invaders is killed in battle and wakes up at the start of the same day — a time loop in a war novel. The Japanese light novel that became the basis for the film Edge of Tomorrow; shares The Forever War's interest in the dehumanizing mechanics of military deployment.
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The Things They Carried
by Tim O'Brien
Linked stories about a platoon of American soldiers in the Vietnam War. The nonfiction-adjacent literary ancestor of The Forever War — Haldeman was a Vietnam veteran, and The Forever War is in direct conversation with O'Brien's work on what soldiers carry and what happens when they come home.
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Ender's Game
by Orson Scott Card
A child genius is trained through increasingly realistic war games to command Earth's fleet against an alien species. Shares The Forever War's interest in military training as dehumanization and in the gap between the information soldiers are given and what is actually happening.
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All Systems Red
by Martha Wells
A construct (part human, part machine) that calls itself Murderbot would rather watch TV than protect the scientists it's assigned to guard. A lighter, more comedic take on what a combat unit thinks about the wars it's fought — Wells, like Haldeman, is interested in what being a weapon does to the self-concept of the thing doing the fighting.
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Armor
by John Steakley
A soldier in powered armor fights an alien invasion of humanity's extrasolar colonies — sometimes the armor seems to have its own will. Published the same year as The Forever War and sharing its interest in what sustained combat does to a person's inner life. Less canonical but beloved by military SF readers.
- 8Buy
The Expanse
by James S.A. Corey
Three hundred years in the future, humanity has colonized the solar system and is on the verge of war between Earth, Mars, and the Belt when a detective and a ship's crew discover a threat that makes the human conflict irrelevant. The most comprehensive contemporary hard SF military setting — politically serious and using the same relativistic physics The Forever War builds on.
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