Joe Haldeman's The Forever War is, I imagine, to Heinlein's Starship Troopers as Vietnam-era Army grunts are to WWII roughnecks. Written in the mid-1970's the story follows the rise through the ranks of space marine William Mandella, drafted by the world government of Earth circa 2005. We're at war with an alien race, the Taurans, for control of a network of wormholes ("collapsars").
My interest was piqued after finding out that director Ridley Scott has had his eye on it for 25 years and by 2011 it could become his first sci-fi movie since Blade Runner.
It's a good story, made better with plausible descriptions of how society changes. Due to the relativistic effects of time dilation, what is a few years in Mandella's reference frame is centuries on Earth. The bulk of the novel is told through first-person narrative so it'll be interesting to see how it is translated to the screen. (FWIW Scott's Body of Lies opens by employing two devices: the protagonist narrating notes to a computer and testifying to a committee).
There's a number of other things that Haldeman does really well such as describing activity on cryogenic worlds or battles at near-light speeds (with computers controlling, frozen in near-statis and encased in gel, the soldiers can endure accelerations up to 25g). As in Troopers, barracks are coed and fraternization is accepted; a large part of the human interest is provided by Mandella's relationship with a female compatriot.
I won't give away the ending, but one interesting and imaginative thing was that in its last look at Earth, a millennium in the future, a transhuman or posthuman society has taken over. The clone of a single person, multiplied into the billions, residing on many worlds, is a hive-mind entity. The Taurans, likewise, have a collective mind. Mandella, returning from the Large Magellenic Cloud, asks how the Tauran and the Human are able to communicate mind-to-mind. The human immediately replies that Mandella is incapable of understanding (implying that it's by a post-human mental power).
Cool stuff. If Ridley Scott puts anywhere near the effort he put into Blade Runner, it'll be an amazing movie!
