Could the largest, most expensive scientific experiment destroy the world in September? Surely you’re thinking that sounds like fact, but this is nothing but cold, hard fiction. To be specifc, it’s Forever Peace, by Joe Haldeman.

I picked up the Peace and War omnibus edition of Haldeman’s The Forever War, its sequel Forever Free and the companion novel Forever Peace. I’d recommend all of them as an interesting read. Hugo and Nebula award-winning The Forever War (1974) made Haldeman’s name and is remarkable for many things, not least of which is the paucity of scenes involving actual battle. It’s a novel about being a soldier, about how soldiers are made and used, not about war as physical violence; it’s also one of the novels about the realities of relativity.

The second novel in the Peace and War compilation, Forever Free (1999), is actually the last to have been written, and is by far the weakest. It follows the adventures of the protagonists of The Forever War (henceforth, TFW), but departs in some measure from the themes of its fêted predecessor, and not particularly successfully. Haldeman’s style is often to reveal the true conflict only after you’ve settled in to the ostensible plot (when he’s not giving things away with “Or so I thought…”-style scene endings). There’s not much, therefore, that I can say about the final conceit of the novel, except that perhaps the futility of it is a little too much, for me. Suffice to say, if you read TFW, I’m sure that you’ll want to read Forever Free, no matter what I say. That’s why sequels sell.

The let-down of Forever Free is particularly baffling in light of the fact that it was first published only a couple of years after the final part of the compilation, Forever Peace (1997). This novel also won both the Hugo and the Nebula; it’s not a sequel, it is an equal (to borrow a tag line that has previously been misapplied). Forever Peace returns to the themes of the first novel, bringing readers closer to home before hurling them further, I think, than the furthest excursions of The Forever War. The first half of Forever Peace takes its cues from TFW, but the second half goes off on its own path. Again, I don’t want to say too much about it, and I must confess to feeling a slight ambivalence about some aspects of it, but as a whole it’s an excellent novel. Let’s just say that it starts with remotely-operated soldier-machines, and doesn’t finish with the end of the world…

Coincidentally, I finished Forever Peace in the early hours of 14 September, the day on which, the story has it, everything is supposed to go boom. (It’s the year 2043 in the book, but that’s by-the-by.) With the first firing of the Large Hadron Collider only last week, this strand of the story resonated particularly strongly for me. I don’t have any concerns about the LHC, but “What If…?” is a fun game.

If you’ve never read Forever Peace, why not now?