Pandemic Reads 10–12
Forever War, Silent Steppe, and The Last Days of El Comandante
Recently I don’t have quality internet access, so I’ve been powering through books more quickly. These three books are classic science fiction, a Kazakh nomad’s autobiography, and a translated historical fiction from Venezuela.
The Forever War (Joe Haldeman, 1974 / 2009 edition)
This book was originally published in 1974 by a Vietnam veteran who’d just returned to the US. In this new war, soldiers are trained on an icy rock beyond Pluto, then shipped through wormholes onto distant planets to set up stations and counter Taurans, another group of colonizing space travelers. A downside of traveling in wormholes and relativistic speed ships is that between the author’s three encounters with aliens, decades or centuries pass on Earth.
The novel was originally serialized in parts which are jarringly different, but this contributes to overall themes of disorientation and alienation between time periods. Training is full of deadly challenges which are irrelevant to their actual deployment. The aliens originally do little to defend themselves, leaving the soldiers sickened by their mission. Then the Earth that they left behind has changed and descended into chaos (more on this later). By his third mission, the main character is one of the most senior officers (by Earth-time) and reflects on the differences between being on the front line and giving orders as an out-of-touch old officer.
The differences between serialized parts of the story don’t always come off as intentional — in the beginning there is technical detail about spacesuits, alien habitats, the conscription of genius-IQ citizens, and some soldiers having psychic awareness. Little of this reappears later in the book.
There are shared themes with Starship Troopers (Forever War was, after all, written midway between the book and the satirical movie), and the authors have complimented each other. A spoiler-free quick summary might be “a memoir of a soldier living through Starship Troopers, written by a Vietnam veteran”.
It’s necessary to question the author’s portrayal of the failing, decaying Earth including everyone becoming homosexual. The main character is at times repulsed or indifferent to these changes, eventually moving to a colony of other people from his era.
You can find a few reviewers’ apologia that this storyline emphasizes the main character’s alienation, reflects changing attitudes during the 1970s, or is progressive in its willingness to speculate.
In a 2015 Reddit AMA, the author wrote:
I was trying to create a science-fictional U.S.A. that satirized various aspects of the here-and-now — which is to say, the there-and-then
[…]
I lived in Iowa City then, which was a hotbed of gay activism — and, of course, anti-gay outrage. So both of those were on my palette while I was creating the future-Earth scenario that frames the middle of the book.
[…]
My own position is ordinary for a straight male born in the 1940’s. I don’t “understand” desire and love between two men the way I understand desire and love between a man and a woman. That doesn’t mean I think one is more “natural” than the other, which is criminal nonsense. One is more usual than the other. That’s a statistical observation, not a moral judgment
So what to make of it?
There’s a thoughtful 2018 post which includes whether to include Forever War in LGBT fiction:
Silent Steppe: The Memoir of a Kazakh Nomad Under Stalin (Mukhamet Shayakhmetov, 2007)
Why this book? I’ve been in interested in traditional nomads for years, and once attended the Ölgii eagle festival in the Kazakh region of Mongolia.
Shayakhmetov was born in 1922 to a nomadic herder family by the Irtysh River in the eastern corner of Kazakhstan. Almost all of the book describes his life from ages 9–12, when communists abruptly ended their way of life, setting up collective farms, banning traditional marriage ceremonies, and setting up show trials and parades to channel farmers into the revolutionary spirit.
A court reported that his father owned hundreds of animals, which got him labeled a kulak and tax-evader. Most Kazakhs suffered during this time from disease, famine, and new totalitarian rules, but Shayakhmetov’s family particularly suffered because few would risk educating, housing, or employing anyone in a kulak family. He was expelled from school and followed his mother from town to town to support his father in work camps, then to scavenge leftover wheat from mills and fields. There are a few positive childhood memories which stand out, such as kindness of strangers in difficult times, seeing a steamboat and train for the first time, or becoming a translator for Russians and Kazakhs suddenly living together.
The author draws on historical records, conversations with family (for example: detailing nomads’ experience under the Tsar), and more recent events in Kazakhstan to tell a more complete story. This retrospective voice is beneficial in later sections, when the author explains how he could join a young communist organization at school and patriotically help read out the new Soviet constitution:
Like so many others, I saw no contradiction in working within the system which had persecuted my family, choosing to believe that our sufferings were attributable to unscrupulous individuals, beginning with Stalin’s Soviet Party chief in Kazakhstan […] and then the underlings down the scale, rather than to Stalin himself and the ruthlessness of the ideology […] However evil the practice of the system, which led to mass destruction for the Kazakhs, I neither fostered nor harbored hostility for the system itself.
This region and time period was minimized to only a few sentences of the history that I learned in school. In this crazy year, I was moved by Shayakhmetov’s ability to continue on after being uprooted and put through so many challenges. I also saw how his strongest memories were which family ties were strained, and which broke, during those times.
The Last Days of El Comandante (Alberto Barrera Tyszka, 2020 translation)
This is a piece of historical fiction from several different perspectives during Chavez’s last year (2012–2013). Chavez was open about having cancer, but left much open to mystery, leading a journalist wanting to investigate, and a retired oncologist annoyed by questioning relatives.
We get mini-portraits of characters: an American fascinated by Chavez’s charisma, a mother pulling her daughter from school after seeing news reports on violence, people trying to stay politically neutral while living with radicals, Venezuelans who fled the country for opportunity, or coming home to retire. They all cross paths through an apartment complex in Caracas, but this connection is faintly drawn — it is better just to think of it as a collection of voices of this time period.
This book didn’t click with me, maybe because it was too many parables with a known conclusion (we know it’s the last days of Chavez).
