Joe Haldeman
Joe Haldeman
Joe William Haldemanis an American science fiction author. He is best known for his 1974 novel The Forever War. That novel, and other of his works including The Hemingway Hoaxand Forever Peace, have won major science fiction awards including the Hugo Award and Nebula Award. For his career writing science fiction and/or fantasy he is a SFWA Grand Master and since 2012 a member of the Science Fiction Hall of Fame...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionAuthor
Date of Birth9 June 1943
CountryUnited States of America
I think I would have been a writer, anyhow, in the sense of having written a story every now and then, or continued writing poetry. But it was the war experience and the two novels I wrote about Vietnam that really got me started as a professional writer.
No person can escape Einsteinian relativity, and no soldier or veteran can escape the trauma of war's dislocation.
I suspect that war will become obsolete only when something worse supercedes it.
I met Heinlein after 'The Forever War' had won the Hugo and Nebula Awards. He shook my hand and said he loved the book so much, he'd read it three times.
Maybe war is an inevitable product of human nature. Maybe to get rid of war, we have to become something other than human.
One cannot make command decisions simply by assessing the tactical situation and going ahead with whatever course of action will do the most harm to the enemy with a minimum of death and damage to your own men and materiel. Modern warfare has become very complex, especially during the last century. Wars are won not by a simple series of battles won, but by a complex interrelationship among military victory, economic pressures, logistic maneuvering, access to the enemy’s information, political postures—dozens, literally dozens of factors.
The 1143-year-long war hand begun on false pretenses and only because the two races were unable to communicate. Once they could talk, the first question was 'Why did you start this thing?' and the answer was 'Me?
There's something special about writing by hand, writing with a fountain pen, and there's something special about writing into a book, to take a blank book and turn it into an actual book.
Most science fiction is about white men who are 25 to 30, who are very smart, who face a physical problem and solve it.
Traveling anywhere in the world involves some risk. You could always opt to spend your life cowering under your bed.
When I first started working at MIT, back in the '80s, our writing department had a joint cocktail party with the Harvard writing department. It was kind of oil-and-water.
No good deed goes unpunished. I missed the moon landing by being nice to a stranger.
Political art - not always a contradiction in terms - can destroy institutions, or eat away at them.
One hopes that they'll never be able to use mind control weapons, because we're all done for if that happens. I don't want military people, or political people, to have that type of power over those of us who just get by from day to day.