The Eternity Brigade is another great read, similar to The Forever War, but with one big exception: The accuracy of its predictions. The Forever War predicted things that actually came true, like the legalization of marijuana, or the government encouraging homosexuality to control population growth. The Eternity Brigade doesn't use wormholes to take us into the future, instead, soldiers are frozen at the end of a war and then thawed out at the start of the next war, keeping the cadre battle hardened without having to maintain a standing army during peacetime. Later the process skips freezing and uses something similar to Star Trek's transporter to digitize the soldiers and keep them in memory until needed, and of course later the Army gets the bright idea to mass produce them to make entire regiments out of one guy, but don't let me spoil it for you!
In The Eternity Brigade, written in 1980, not long after The Forever War, the future is much less fun, much bleaker than The Forever War. Hawker is frozen for 12 years, fights a war in China, survives, then is repatriated back to the States, where he finds conditions pretty horrible. Gasoline is almost non-existent, energy is extremely expensive, and even though he and his buddies are filthy rich after their twelve years of monthly pay has been compounded with interest as they slept, they have to take a bus to New York, whereas before they were frozen they flew cheaply and easily to Las Vegas on just the signing bonus. In this future world, citizens have to have a photo ID card to travel, and permission to enter the cities to keep out illegal aliens, troublemakers and terrorists. As gripping as Stephen Goldin's tale is, it's hard to read something that turned out to be so wrong. But, remember, at the time everyone thought that we would run out of oil, and things would get worse and worse over time.Perhaps authors in search of character motivations in futuristic novels should read this book, The Bottomless Well.
In The Eternity Brigade, written in 1980, not long after The Forever War, the future is much less fun, much bleaker than The Forever War. Hawker is frozen for 12 years, fights a war in China, survives, then is repatriated back to the States, where he finds conditions pretty horrible. Gasoline is almost non-existent, energy is extremely expensive, and even though he and his buddies are filthy rich after their twelve years of monthly pay has been compounded with interest as they slept, they have to take a bus to New York, whereas before they were frozen they flew cheaply and easily to Las Vegas on just the signing bonus. In this future world, citizens have to have a photo ID card to travel, and permission to enter the cities to keep out illegal aliens, troublemakers and terrorists. As gripping as Stephen Goldin's tale is, it's hard to read something that turned out to be so wrong. But, remember, at the time everyone thought that we would run out of oil, and things would get worse and worse over time.Perhaps authors in search of character motivations in futuristic novels should read this book, The Bottomless Well.
This book tells us that there will never be a shortage of energy, ever again. How many of us wasted our lives worrying that the future was going to be bleaker than the past, when in fact, it's gotten better! Malthus predicted that the whole world would starve to death before the 1900s, instead, in the 21st century, the biggest problem the poor have is obesity! I guess Obamacare is going to have to cover Jenny Craig diets! Oh wait, that turned out to be another red herring too. And since we haven't run out of fuel (we never ran out of whale oil and ambergris either, we just found better alternatives) they have to come up with other lies, like Greenhouse Gas emissions to get us to stop burning "fossil fuels." The Bottomless Well, written in 2005 predicted a glut of energy even before Fracking became a household word. Now the price of oil is dropping again, proving that we will never run out of energy, and making those Prius owners look pretty stupid. It's really hard to read The Eternity Brigade now, given that it was so wrong about the future. It just seems so pointless, obviously we are not going to learn anything from this author because he was so wrong. So instead of reading science fiction, or watching the "fake news" predict the next global catastrophe that will never come about, maybe you should try reading a book like The Bottomless Well, which, sorry to say, you'll have to find elsewhere because the library doesn't have a copy.
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