It is with great pleasure that we interview multi-Award-winning and SFWA Grand Master Joe Haldeman. Here we discuss work from the past, writing now and the future.
SFFW: Hello Joe. Thank you very much for taking time to answer these.
I’m writing these questions as Open Road Media are releasing some of your older work in the USA as e-books. I’m very pleased to see that The Forever War is amongst them, which was my personal introduction to your writing in 1980 or so. (I was sixteen.)
After forty years or so since the book’s first publication, what is your perspective on that book today? Do you look at it these days with pride or with embarrassment – I’m asking because I know of other authors who feel that their earlier works, even though they might be well-known, tend to expose what they see as their weaknesses rather than their strengths.
I’m not embarrassed by any of my early writing. I did the best I could with the materials at hand. Some of it (not The Forever War, of course) was unabashedly commercial. I wanted to make a living as a writer, and for the first few years I would write anything that paid well enough.
SFFW: I read The Forever War because at that time I had just read Robert Heinlein’s Starship Troopers, and a lot of reviewers recommended me to read the two as showing different views of similar events. How far do you agree with those who say that The Forever War was written as a response to Robert’s book? Was it, as a staff member at SFFWorld has said to me, ‘designed to shake up the status quo’?
If The Forever War is a response to any book, it would be my own War Year. It was not “designed to shake up the status quo” so much as to tell the best sf war story I could. It was designed to grab the reader by the throat and not let go until the last page.
SFFW: It did make very interesting reading comparing Forever War with 1968, your book about Vietnam, which I read only a few years ago. I found 1968 rather more visceral than Forever War, which I guess was partly the point, but also that the importance of relationships, the black humour and the need for survival were all there as well. Can you explain what, in your opinion, the purpose of the novel 1968 was?
1968 was my Vietnam novel. The Forever War was a science fiction novel about war, among other things – but it was primarily science fiction. In 1968, I wanted to focus on the Vietnam War and what fighting it did to the soldiers and their loved ones.
SFFW: Could it be said that The Forever War is an updating or a projection of what you portrayed in 1968? Is The Forever War about warfare, which seems to be a constant in our lives, even today, but extended to the future?
No, I wasn’t thinking about 1968 when I was writing The Forever War. The germ of it came a couple of years later – after TFW was written but before it was published – and was a direct result of having read John dos Passos’s brilliant book 1918. Of course my title (and the book’s dedication) is a reference to that.
SFFW: In 2015 I think that future war seems to be more covert than overt: rather like in your book Tool of the Trade, also re-published here, which looks at spies and espionage in the future. What was your reason for writing that novel?
Tool of the Trade came out of an assignment I gave to my sf writing class at MIT in 1983. Basically, I wrote the first couple of pages of that book and used that as an example of how to start a suspense novel. Before the semester was over, I’d started extending it, and finished the novel about a year later.
SFFW: Forever Peace also showed future warfare but in a somewhat more detached fashion than the ‘grunts on the ground’ of 1968 and Forever War. Do you see that as a viable future, still?
I never did, really. I don’t try to predict the future with my sf. It might explain the present, if I do a good job.
SFFW: The Forever War is not the only book being re-published here. Of the other books being re-released, do you have any personal favourites?
Probably Tool of the Trade and The Hemingway Hoax.
SFFW: Looking back, if Vietnam and Robert Heinlein was an inspiration to your writing, who else, or what else, influenced your early writing, and in what way?
Asimov and Clarke were the main ones, for mind-expanding ideas expressed in uncomplicated ways. Bradbury for his romantic attitude and poetic approach to language. Roger Zelazny was a big influence as a friend as well as a writer, and I’d say the same about John Brunner and Brian Aldiss (though I don’t think either man cared for the other.)
Travel to Mexico and Europe was extremely influential those first couple of years. That was partly because it “expanded my universe” the way travel always does. But a big part of it was hanging out with fellow writers in those countries. “This is a hell of a life,” I thought, “and I want a piece of it!”
SFFW: And, in 2015? What are your aspirations today?
I still like this somewhat exotic life style. It’s hard for me to imagine any literary aspirations beyond what I’ve already achieved.
I don’t need more prizes or fame or money. I do want to keep doing what I’ve been doing these almost fifty years. Get up in the morning and uncap my fountain pen; sit down and find out what’s inside there.
SFFW: I guess at this point it would be appropriate to ask the age-old question: what is it that keeps you writing, today – or have you now got to the point where you can happily walk away, feeling that ‘the job is done’?
I don’t think the job is ever “done” in the sense that there’s no reason to write more. As long as the world keeps changing, there’s plenty to complain about.
SFFW:The science fiction field is a genre that has grown in style, maturity and complexity over the years. As an SFWA Grand Master, do you find yourself still reading for entertainment much these days?
I pretty much stopped reading sf for entertainment when I started writing it for a living. I do read a couple of books a week, but normally not sf, or fiction at all.
SFFW: And what of newer authors? Are there any personal favourites?
“New” to me is probably not new to you. Old writers and new ones have the power to delight me, but I hesitate to make lists. You’ll always leave someone out and they’ll find out!
SFFW: How much do you need to know of current SF writing (and writers!) to be a success in the 21st century?
Some writers study other writers in great detail, to their evident improvement. Others, equally successful, ignore their competition. You can’t generalize.
(Or you can generalize, in this direction: Do what you most want to do. If it doesn’t work, nobody’s hurt.)
SFFW: How are you finding the e-book revolution? Are you happy with an e-reader these days, or do you still prefer ‘tree-books’?
I do read e-books, but prefer paper. Most of my fiction reading is in the tub!
SFFW: Would you care to pass on any advice to writers starting out? What was the best advice you were ever given when starting out?
Seriously consider all advice and throw out most of it. Perhaps the most valuable advice I ever got was from Stanley Elkin, one of my professors, who said to stop writing that science fiction shit, or I would never be taken seriously.
I decided not to take him seriously.
It’s always a good idea not to burn all your bridges behind you. Don’t start writing full-time until you’re selling regularly – unless you have somebody else to pay the bills.
You don’t have to make friends, but only an idiot makes enemies on purpose. That sounds like advice no one would ever need – but I’ve seen several young writers over the years crash and burn by resolutely making enemies left and right. If you’re that kind of person, you might want to emulate Thoreau – get a cabin in the woods and never go online.
SFFW: Congratulations on your recent retirement from the post of associate professor in the Department of Writing and Humanistic Studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Do you have any plans for your time?
Keep writing till I run out of ink.
SFFW: Ha! Great answer. Once again, Joe, thank you very much for your time.
Mark Yon & SFFWorld, June 2015
Great interview – some really intelligent questions there. What’s especially interesting in how he rebukes any idea that TFW was about Vietnam, because – having only just read it – I struggled to see too direct a comparison, despite that it is frequently referred to as a Vietnam story dressed up SF.
Thanks, Brian. The Forever War is one I’ve read a few times. I think the Vietnam links were made, at least in part, due to the fact that it was known that Joe had been in Vietnam himself (Purple Heart recipient) and that he had written both fact and fiction about it before The Forever War. Not all was published at the time, but it seems to fit the ‘write what you know…’ adage (not always easy in SF or Fantasy!)