Forever Peace is a thematic rather than direct sequel to Haldeman's earlier novel The Forever War, dealing with some of the same issues of battle, pacifism, military technology, love, and destiny, but in a new setting with new characters. It's stuffed with ideas; overstuffed in my opinion, and loses the coherence and elegance that made The Forever War an instant classic.

Let's talk about the tech first, since it informs everything else in the novel in what is solid, if slightly dated setting-building. The star technology is the neural jack, which lets two or more humans merge into a gestalt being or experience recorded memories. The army uses this technology to create neurally linked platoons of soldierboys, remotely operated platoons of stealthed humanoid mechs loaded with lethal and non-lethal weaponry. The soldierboys are fighting a war, the wealthy Alliance against the poor Ngumi, over standard post-colonial issues and control of the priceless nanoforges, which have knocked all sense out of the world economy. And meanwhile, scientists are constructing a supersized particle accelerator in Jupiter orbit to probe conditions just after the Big Bang. Neural links, advanced weapons in a very familiar war, and basic physics.

Our protagonist is Julian Case. For 20 days a month, he's a physicist working on the Jupiter Project accelerator. The Army owns his ass for the other 10 days, where he commands a platoon of soldierboys in Costa Rica. Julian stumbles through jungle patrols, snatch missions, and a PR job turned massacre. War is still dangerous, even by remote control. Even though mechanics, as soldierboy operators are called, are out of the line of fire, they suffer strokes and psychological breaks at an alarming rate. Meanwhile, on civvie street Julian has a good, if undefined relationship with an older physicist (his former doctoral adviser and current boss). She decides to get a neural jack, the operation goes poorly and she's paralyzed but recovers. Under stress from everything, Julian attempts suicide, which gets him placed on leave from the army, but also leads him to two fantastic discoveries.

First, the Jupiter Project could destroy the entire universe by creating a bubble of new physical laws (think LHC eating the Earth with an artificial black hole). Second, the ten day limit on soldierboy operations is because people jacked together for much longer develop such a degree of empathy that they can no longer kill. Julian and a group of unlikely allies in the university and the academy develop a plan to kidnap large numbers of people, do neurosurgery to give them jacks, and then create a new pacifistic society by keeping them linked for a few weeks. Up against the plan are a hidden cadre of Enders, apocalypse cultists high in the military with spec-ops assassins at their command. People die, shit goes down, and in the end justice wins out.

There were some eminently cool bits: jungle war, sex while being jacked into your partner, the weird economy of the United Welfare States based on nano-replicated government-distributed goods, but it got buried in a mass of too many new ideas and plot threads. None of the characters really resolved themselves. Julian barely held together as the physicist-draftee, the reluctant warrior, but he was a weaker versi0n of Mandella from The Forever War. I couldn't tell you a thing about any of the other characters just minutes after finishing the book. There's a clear and elegant story here about the reasons why we kill and what killing does to a person, but it's buried under tons of futuristic rubble.