A Separate War and Other Stories
Ace Books by Joe Haldeman
FOREVER PEACE
FOREVER FREE
THE COMING
GUARDIAN
CAMOUFLAGE
OLD TWENTIETH
A SEPARATE WAR AND OTHER STORIES
JOE HALDEMAN
A Separate War and Other Stories
THE BERKLEY PUBLISHING GROUP
Published by the Penguin Group
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.
Copyright © 2006 by Joe Haldeman
For a complete listing of individual copyrights, please see “Copyrights” section.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Haldeman, Joe W.
A separate war and other stories / Joe Haldeman.—1st ed.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-0-7865-8411-6
1. Science fiction, American. I. Title.
PS3558.A353S47 2006
813' .54—dc22
2006006120
For my students, MIT and Clarion;
may their ideas be just crazy enough.
Contents
Meet Joe Haldeman
Introduction: The Secret of Writing
A Separate War
Diminished Chord
Giza
Foreclosure
Four Short Novels
For White Hill
Finding My Shadow
Civil Disobedience
Memento Mori
Faces
Heartwired
Brochure
Out of Phase
Power Complex
Fantasy for Six Electrodes and One Adrenaline Drip
Notes on the Stories
Copyrights
Meet Joe Haldeman
The first time I ever met Joe Haldeman…
That’s how you’re supposed to begin these things, isn’t it? With an anecdote about how you first met? But, as is the case with many of my favorite authors, the first time I ever met Joe Haldeman was in the aisles of the public library, where I found his wonderful novel, The Forever War.
I read science fiction avidly all through my teenage years, beginning with Robert A. Heinlein, so I’d already read Time for the Stars and Starship Troopers and lots and lots of science fiction about faster-than-light travel and futuristic soldiers and intergalactic war.
But I had never read anything like this. The Forever War was a riveting adventure story about a threatening and exciting future, the very stuff of science fiction, but it was much more than that. It actually tried to deal with all the complexities, horrors, and paradoxes of war. (Some critics see the book as a rebuttal to Starship Troopers, and I definitely think it is, but that’s only one aspect of the book.) It was filled with irony—because of the time jumps involved, a soldier could find himself obsolete during the course of a single war, or a single battle, and eternally separated from the things he was ostensibly fighting for—and compassion for the human condition without an ounce of sentimentality.
But it was still unmistakably a science-fiction novel, which used a standard SF device—the relativistic effects of faster-than-light space travel—as a metaphor for the displacement and alienation of soldiers returning to a society with which they can no longer connect. And it was an adult novel, in the best sense of the word, which didn’t flinch at harsh realities or harsher conclusions about who and what we are as a species and what sort of universe it is we inhabit.
In short, it was an amazing book, and an unforgettable one. In the years since I first read it, I’ve thought of it often, most recently when I read about the lack of armor for the soldiers in Iraq. (In The Forever War, the “collapsar” time jumps the soldiers make can render their weapons and armor fatally outdated.) More than anything else I’ve ever read or seen, it gave me insight into the Vietnam War and the experience of the soldiers who were there (Joe was wounded in the war, where he served as a combat engineer). And all wars before and since.
The war novel it most reminded (and reminds) me of is Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front, and that’s the highest compliment I can pay it. I fell completely in love with it, immediately read all the Joe Haldeman I could find, and hoped someday I’d be lucky enough to meet him in person.
A few years later I did, and fell in love all over again. This is not always the case. Meeting authors you admire is often disillusioning and sometimes disastrous. But Joe Haldeman was everything his stories had led me to believe he would be—intelligent, thoughtful, charming, and funny.
And gracious. He’s nice to everyone, fans and students (he teaches writing at MIT) and fellow writers alike, and there’s not an ounce of nasty competitiveness in him. He was wonderful to me the first time I met him (I was awestruck and awkward and, as I recall, gushed something eloquent like, “Oh, gosh, Mr. Haldeman, I love your books!”), and every time since, and I consider myself lucky to be a friend of his. And extraordinarily lucky to have been allowed to present him a richly deserved Nebula Award.
Before I went to Spain the first time, he sent me a list of helpful travel tips, one of which kept me from ordering raw meat (Joe: “Carpaccio means uncooked”), getting lost (“Always carry a card with the hotel’s name and address on it so you can show it to the taxi driver if all else fails”), and generally making an idiot of myself in a foreign country. And everyone who knows him has stories just like that, of considerate things Joe has done.
He’s also modest, even though he’s one of the most respected and admired writers I know. He has won any number of awards, including the Nebula Award (given by the Science Fiction Writers of America) and the Hugo Award (voted on by the membership of the World Science Fiction Convention), has been president of SFWA, and is one of science fiction’s most famous writers. But you’d never know it if you met him.
Joe never touts his own accomplishments, never boasts, never talks about his advances or his sales or his awards. Or his books. Besides The Forever War, he?
??s the author of Mindbridge, Tool of the Trade, Buying Time, All My Sins Remembered, and the acclaimed Worlds series. He’s just as famous for his short stories, including “Out of Phase,” the Hugo-winning “Tricentennial,” and the stories in this volume. He’s also edited several anthologies, among them, Cosmic Laughter and Study War No more, and has had a long and distinguished career.
Which is much harder to do than he makes it look. Writing careers tend to be nasty, brutish, and short, and Joe had the additional problem of sudden fame. When The Forever War was published, it was instantly recognized as a science-fiction classic. It won the Nebula Award, the Hugo Award, and the Australian Ditmar Award, and ever since has been regarded (and rightly so) as one of the most important and groundbreaking books of the field.
Which it is. If I were asked to rank it, I would put it on a very short list of novels along with Frank Herbert’s Dune, Walter M. Miller, Jr.’s A Canticle for Leibowitz, and Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, all of which deal with serious and timeless societal and philosophical issues and which transcend the conventions of the genre at the same time they employ them.
It also catapulted Joe to stardom, with all its attendant difficulties. Writing a classic, especially early in your career, is not necessarily a blessing—look at J. D. Salinger and Truman Capote. Writers who’ve risen to sudden prominence frequently fret about “topping” their previous work so much that they work themselves into terminal writer’s block. Or turn into pretentious, preening jerks. Or settle into a deadly routine of repeating themselves or writing endless sequels to please readers who want more of the same.
Joe Haldeman hasn’t fallen into any of those traps, or, to my knowledge, even given them any thought: He simply writes what he’s interested in and passionate about, from Hemingway to poetry to the human condition, and that intensity has resulted in novels and short stories all very different from each other, except in quality. He writes about traditionally science-fictional subjects—from telepathy to orbiting space colonies to black holes to immortality—but he employs them in uniquely nontraditional ways to explore what it means to be human in a variety of identity-splintering environments.
My personal favorite is The Hemingway Hoax, an eloquent novel about the torments and inescapabilities of the writing life and of life in general. It’s beautifully researched and even more beautifully written. It uses a traditional science-fiction trope, the alternate history, which imagines the very different world that would result from a single different action at some point in the past. Alternate history has a long and noble history, beginning with Ward Moore’s Bring the Jubilee, but it’s often used to play shallow historical chess games or advance pet political agendas. But Joe Haldeman uses it to explore all the choices and chances of our lives, and the near impossibility of keeping our footing when the ground continually shifts beneath us.
This attempt to keep one’s footing, to find meaning in the world even if it is a world without meaning, and the beyond-difficult task of defining morality in such a world, are what Joe Haldeman’s work is all about. His intense belief in that search for meaning permeates everything he writes.
He cares deeply, passionately about his writing, and at the same time is a total professional. He’s dedicated to the art and craft of writing. He writes every day, working meticulously to get each sentence absolutely perfect before he goes on to the next. And that devotion to craft, to detail, is what makes his work so good.
All of his work is painstakingly researched, but it’s never nitpicking or pedantic. I talked before about The Hemingway Hoax. Reading the story, it’s obvious Joe knows every single detail there is to know about Hemingway, but it doesn’t stop there. He has also made a real effort to understand the man and the writer.
Every single work of his reflects that same dedication to detail. One of my favorite stories about Joe is the one Sheila Williams, the editor of Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, tells about dealing with Joe and a first-time-out author on the same day. She left phone messages one after the other for both, asking them to check on possible errors in both their stories. The first-time author called back to complain about the arrogance of an editor daring to touch his deathless prose and to whine, “I don’t see what difference it makes. The readers will never notice.” (Not true, his mistake was both major and inexcusable.) Multi–award winner Joe Haldeman, on the other hand, whose error really was minor, complained not at all. Instead, he called back in the late afternoon with his changes and to say he was sorry he’d taken so long to get back to Sheila, but the necessary book had been checked out of his local library, so he’d ridden his bike fifteen miles into the city to the main library to find it. “That’s why he’s Joe Haldeman,” Sheila says admiringly.
It is. He’s a complete professional, from the seemingly minor details of a story to its larger emotional truths, from teaching to signing books for fans (some of whom interrupt him in the middle of dinner), from his stories to his friendships. He’ll expend any amount of effort to get it right.
Which is why I still find opening a Joe Haldeman book (like this new collection of short stories) just as exciting as finding The Forever War in the library and meeting Joe Haldeman for the first time. I know you will, too. It’s a gem. Just like Joe Haldeman.
—Connie Willis
Introduction: The Secret of Writing
When I was too young to check books out of the adult section of the local library, I spent a lot of weekend time sitting there and reading the forbidden texts. There was one officious librarian who would always shoo me back to the children’s section (and try to make me read something besides that science fiction trash), but most of them tolerated my intrusion.
My favorite adult book was a fat red tome called Henley’s Twentieth Century Book of Formulas, Processes, and Trade Secrets. “Secrets” is the dramatic and operative word there. How to make your own root beer or nitroglycerin. Cure asthma or constipation in canaries. I would bicycle away from the library aglow with secret wisdom. Things I knew my parents didn’t know.
Any letter of the alphabet would yield marvels: Bear fat, bookbinder’s varnish, bust reducer, British champagne, broken bones (a test for), blasting powder, Bowl of Fire trick. “Burning Brimstone” is not a trick you’ll find in contemporary manuals of magic: “Wrap cotton around two small pieces of brimstone and wet it with gasoline; take between the fingers, squeezing the surplus liquid out, light it with a candle, throw back the head well, and put it on the tongue blazing. Blow fire from mouth, and observe that a freshly blown-out candle may be lighted from the flame.”
The book was full of advice that might or might not help one survive into adulthood: “The warning as to the danger of experimenting with the manufacture of ordinary gunpowder applies with renewed force when nitro-glycerine is the subject of the experiment.”
It was old then, more than fifty years ago, and that was a large part of its charm. Even as a boy, I could appreciate the innocence and earnestness of that bygone day, when there was a secret formula for everything.
But did it have a secret formula for writing? You bet it did: Make a solution of alum in strong vinegar and, using a fine-tipped brush, write a message on an egg. When the vinegar dries, the message will disappear. But hard-boil the egg and break it open—and there it is again, inside!
Which brings us around to the point of this little essay.
When I put together my first collection of short stories—Infinite Dreams, back in 1978, I introduced each story with a paragraph or two about where I thought it had come from—admitting that I knew that some people didn’t care for that kind of blather, but we put it in a different typeface, easy to skip.
In the next collection (Dealing in Futures, 1985), I refined the idea by dividing the introduction into one piece before the story, carefully not giving anything away, and then a “coda” piece after the story, which assumed the reader had read it, and would segue into the intro to the next story.
That
was a little too complicated. In the third one (None So Blind, 1996), I wrote plain afterwords, commenting on the extent to which each story had been affected by actual events.
Ten years later, I wonder whether I’ve told anybody anything as useful as how to hide a message in an egg.
Anybody who’s interested knows that there’s no “secret formula” to writing fiction, at least fiction that aspires to accomplishing anything beyond filling time for the reader. Of course some forms of fiction are more or less formulaic, like sin-and-suffer confessions and pornography. When I was in graduate school in computer science, a friend and I put together a string-manipulation program that churned out WWI Flying Ace Stories, and, for the genre, I don’t think they were half-bad. But most of us would rather read and write fiction that requires something more subtle than a random number generator to decide what happens next.
It occurs to me, assembling this fourth collection, that the typographical tradition of restricting story introduction and afterwords to a hundred or so words, and separating them by the stories themselves, limits what the author can say about each story, as well as how the stories might be related. So this time I’m assembling all of that stuff, I mean wit and wisdom, into one section in the back of the book, “Notes on the Stories.” If nothing else, it will make it convenient for people who, like me, flip through and read all the introductions first, as well as for those who want to ignore everything but the stories.