Mindbridge by Joe Haldeman

I am writing this book review months after having finished Mindbridge, unfortunately.  Somehow I forgot to write this post at the time and only just realized it going back through some of my older book posts.  So here goes nothing -

Mindbridge by Joe Haldeman, author of the Forever War, was an easy and enjoyable science fiction read.  From what I remember it had science fiction features that the people exploited but didn’t really understand such as the way they were able to travel between points in space instantaneously at a relatively low energy cost.  The “mindbridge” of the title allowed two people touching it to link in a quasi-two-way-telepathic connection.  The mindbridge itself was a creature found on one of the planets travelled to by the humans and ended up being a plaything of a much more powerful star faring race.

Overall, the novel has quite a few cool ideas one of which being a fairly unique alien race.  Unique in the way they interact with humanity at least.  It’s not a bad book but nothing really special.  I would much rather recommend Joe Haldeman’s Forever War or Forever Peace.  This book isn’t quite on their level.

6/10

Forever Peace by Joe Haldeman

Forever Peace by Joe Haldeman is surprisingly not a novel connected in any way to his earlier work, the Forever War.  While they are similar in their objects to war the similarity pretty much stops there.  Forever Peace takes place exclusively on earth in the mid-21st century (almost exactly 2050).  1st world countries possessing nanoforge technologies that allow them to synthesize any object from a material bank rule over the world and prevent the 3rd world or developing countries from accessing the technology.  Central to this control, the countries possessing the nanoforges utilize “soldierboys” and “flyboys” – machines that are controlled by the thoughts of an individual jacked into the robot body.

What’s interesting about the way that Haldeman presents the concept, however, is that soldierboys are jacked together in a total group mind experience of 10 of them to a unit.  While jacked everyone intimately knows everybody else, all their secrets, feelings, emotions – precisely what it’s like to be that other person.  In this regard jacking for Haldeman is much more interesting a concept than jacking in other fantasies like the matrix.