Short Reviews of several Joe Haldeman Novels

This will contain spoilers

I love Forever War by Joe Haldeman. It is my favourite science-fiction-novel, and I highly recommend everyone read it.

I also devoured other Joe-haldeman-Novels, and was, disappointed.

After a recent re-read a few of his novels I noticed his style much more than in the past. It’s not just about the prose he writes, but also the elements that seem to occur in every one of his novels. Let’s look at the novels, and then his classic elements.

Joe Haldeman Novels I’ve read

• Forever War
• Forever War Graphic Novel
• Forever Peace
• Forever Free
• Work Done for Hire
• Marsbound
• Starbound
• Earthbound
• A Separate War and Other Stories (short-story collection)
• The Accidental Time-Machine
• The Hemingway Hoax
• Camouflage

 

The Forever War

Forever War was made after the jingoistic and militaristic Starship Troopers Novel came out, and take a decidely anti-militarism stance against it.

It deals with people being used and abused by an inhumane bureaucratic military machine that discards them in the most unfeeling manner, ripping them from their times and families. It was inspired by Haldeman’s eperiences during the Vietnam War.

Forever Peace

Spiritual sequel to Forever War. The main character is an academic and soldier controlling a “soldierboy”, a remotely controlled fighter while mind-sharing with several other people.

Forever Free

Actual sequel to Forever War. The last human colony tries to start an expedition 40000 years into the future.

Works pretty well except for the abrupt ending which introduces the aliens from Camouflage and a literal Deus Ex Machina.

A Separate War and Other Stories (short-story collection)

A few of the stories are great! One is a collection of four stories all starting with the line “So it became to pass that no-one had to die”, and explore different ways how immortality affects society.

Another one (“A Separate War”) ties into Forever War, but due to its short nature it doesn’t really come to anything.

The Forever War – Graphic Novel

The comic-adaption of Forever War is… disappointing. The story and environment suffer greatly from being condensed into a very compact format. Additionaly the visuals are sub-par and boring, and confusing at best. The military moves around in massive behemoth ships, but the landers look like real-world Space Shuttles.

The only positive ascept about it is a tiny bit that illuminates the main characters’ status as celebrities when returning home after their first missions, which went less explored in the actual novel.

Camouflage

Follows two shape-shifting aliens over the centuries as they navigate living among humanity.

The Hemingway Hoax

An author tries to create a “lost” Hemingway-novel and ends up jumping trough different alternate universes while evading entities which make sure that is not supposed to happen.

The Accidental Time-Machine

The Accidental Time-Machine is a riff on Orson Welles, with the protagonist accidentally assembling a time-machine and jumping long distances into the future.

Haldeman does what Haldeman does best and describes the weird and actually quite interesting civilizations that have developed in the increasingly far future, and how they came to be. Nothing ever comes from these, as they are treated as curiosities without any deeper meaning, and are as quickly abandonned as they are introduced.

As usual the story ends by barely set-up intervention of a higher power.

Marsbound, Starbound & Earthbound

The Marsbound-Trilogy is a weird beast as well.

Marsbound introduces the world with its Mars-colony and systems in place to support, as well as how it handles finding an intelligent lifeform. The sequel swaps this out for a decade-long deep-space mission to find another Alien entity, and Earthbound takes place entirely in a post-apocalyptic Earth where all electricity has been shut off by an alien species.

Work Done for Hire

Set in modern day. Main character is being framed for murder and tries to solve the mystery of it. Ends even more abruptly than the others.

Themes

Sexuality

This is treated the same vein as other “weird” stuff is treated. “Huh look at this weird future I guess this is it now”. The entirety of humanity turning bisexual is pointed out as different and accepted with resignation as the new default.

This is unlike Yoon Ha Lee‘s Ninefox Gambit, where all sexualities and genders are treated as “regular” without any need to point it out.

As most of his works were created decades ago this seems ok enough, and is still lightyears aheads of Orson Scott Card‘s absencence of everything but hetero-marriage.

Stuff happens, sudden ending

Most of his novels follow this formula. There is a series of events (mostly happening to the protagonist, and less driven by them), and then it ends.

Style

Joe Haldeman‘s style is one of helplessness in new and uncommon situations, of having unknown worlds thrust upon you. It is a stream-of-consciousness narration that lives in the now

The thing is, in certain settings it works really well.

It works in sci-fi, and it works really well in military sci-fi. It might be the only style that allows Forever War to be so brilliant.

Stock Elements

• Older Academic / Author (often the protagonist)
• Younger love-interest
• Some sort of military person
• Lots of other academics
• Abrupt ending

Ranking (relative to each other)

• Forever War
• A Separate War and Other Stories (short-story collection)
• Forever Peace
• Forever Free
• The Accidental Time-Machine
• Marsbound
• Starbound
• Camouflage
• The Hemingway Hoax
• Forever War Graphic Novel
• Earthbound
• Work Done for Hire

Conclusion

Go read Forever War. If you want more afterwards, check out the others.

-Matthias

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The History of the Jedi in Star Wars Galaxies

The history of the Jedi in Star Wars Galaxies. I did a series of tweets on this, and copied them here:

• I just stumbled on @RaphKoster‘s article on the original planned Jedi-Gameplay from #StarWarsGalaxies #SWG. Go check it out, it’s #gamedev-gold!
  https://www.raphkoster.com/2015/04/16/a-jedi-saga/ More details (from that article and my memory) in thread below:
• The main issue with #SWG was that it was set between Ep. 3 & 4, in which Jedi were -really rare- and -really powerful-. Everyone would love to play a Jedi, but having 1000’s of them running around would break the illusion of the gameworld
• The article details ways they tried to accomplish that with gameplay. One (discarded) option was that everyone could be a jedi, but once you use force-powers the empire would come after you in increasingly unfair numbers.
• Additionally your Jedi would have to endure permadeath. If you die as a Jedi, you are dead forever.
  What ended up being used was this, and for a time it was wonderful :) :
• #SWG had 30+ “professions”. People would become bounty hunters, animal tamers, dancers, cooks, form guilds, etc. They just did that and lived in the world, and no-one cared about Jedi. No-one ever saw any, and they were just legends. Just like in that period in StarWars.
• Then, 6 months after the game came out, the first Jedi appeared.
  The community went WILD.
• How did she manage it? She didn’t even know it herself. No “you achieved Jedi Status” marker popped up in the moment, it was just there at one point. The player posted a list of all the things she accomplished, incl. visiting all planets, never marrying, reaching a certain level, and about 20 more things.
• People were scrambling to find out how she became and Jedi and tried to reproduce these actions, but nobody could figure it out. So they went back to living in the world, being dancers, cooks, traders, etc.
• What was going on under the hood is that every player had 5 professions randomly “chosen” for them, without them ever knowing. Once these were maxed out they would become a Jedi, but they would be only told when logging in next time.
• Originally this idea also included things like “climb this mountain” or “do 5 duels”, but in the short development-time they only managed to implement the profession-based Jedi system (as professions were already present and could be tracked)
• It was good. People loved the game, and Jedi were exceedingly rare and mythical. This kind of game would not be built today.
• Then people (Players? Excecutives? idk) demanded more Jedi. Holocrons were added to the gameworld which could tell you one of the skills you needed to max out to get closer to becoming a Jedi. People knew the way now, and all they did was farm to become a Jedi
• The illusion was broken, and now all people wanted to do was to become a jedi. There were many, and they were not mythical any longer.
• Eventually development caved and an entire addon called “Trials of Obi-Wan” was released, which was centered on Jedi.
  A MONTH later the New Game Expansion was released, which was practically a new game, in which “Jedi” was a starting profession, and utterly mundane.
• And that was the story of the Jedi in #StarWarsGalaxies, and how utterly brilliant the game-design-concept behind them was. Totally recommend reading this piece, and the accomplishing articles about other parts of #SWG https://www.raphkoster.com/2015/04/16/a-jedi-saga/

-Matthias

Let’s Protest! & Restoring Defunct Games

I just made Let’s Protest, my Molyjam 2012 game, playable again. Go check it out if you haven’t yet!

It was built for a Unity WebPlayer, whose support has been discontinued. Most of my games have been built for that, and a lot of them are sadly now defunct.

Restoring them is sadly not trivial. Here are the steps involved:

• Finding Source-Code (my good filekeeping makes this quick)
• Re-importing into Unity with WebGl-Settings. Depending on the size of the project this might take up to 1 hour
• Adapting code to new standards, which is fairly straightforward, but has the potential to take up a lot of time
• Dealing with Plugins & Libraries. This makes me happy I was anxious in the past about overly relying on 3rd-party-elements outside my understanding, and I was totally right. A lot of old plugins have now non-accepted code or just stopped working. Even if they are still supported getting the newest version and integrating them would take a noticable amount of time. Not to mention tools which might have changed their pricing and have thus become more expensive to acquire. This can become very time-intensive.
• Checking everything in the game still works correctly
• Checking everything still works after building. Unity WebGL-Builds sometimes produce issues not found in other builds, and this needs to be taken care of
• Publishing

At best this entire process takes 2-3 hours. At worst (as it was 6 months ago for another game) it took me a month to figure out a super-slow publishing issue.

This is why it is infeasible for me to re-release all of those old titles, even though I would love to.

-Matthias

I made a Sky Rogue mod!

I made a mod for Sky Rogue!

You can get the Albatross on Steam here.

Go check it out!

-Matthias

Modern Germany in media: XCOM

I feel modern Germany gets less media-representation than WWII-era Germany. Whenever that does happen though it is often done in a rushed manner, where you can tell it isn’t really German but rather an existing setting that has been lazily decorated.

I want to look at media (TV-shows, films, games, etc) that feature modern Germany, how right they get it, and how much work they put in it, so that we can distinguish a good representation from a lazy one.

Realistically speaking it is not feasibly to do a fully authentic representation when only say a 1-minute scene in a movie is supposed to take place there. A little care will greatly improve results though and make it much more believable.

This happens for other countries too! A bad example of this is this promo-art for PayDay 2, which is supposed to reference the Dublin police.

Only there is no Dublin Police Debt. There is the Garda, which one minute of research would have revealed.

The opening level of XCOM

XCOM: Enemy Unknown (2012, Firaxis Games) is a turn-based strategy-game in which you control special-ops soldiers against an alien invasion. The XCOM organization is made up from international soldiers and operates all over the world.

The introductory scene of the game is set in an unspecified location in Germany.

 

Spoken Language

There are a few lines of German spoken, phonetically. This means the voice-actors didn’t necessarily actually understand what was being said, and just read out the phonetic sounds. The pronounciation is on the better side and almost passes for natural speaking.

OK

 

Architecture

The types of pavement, buildings, statues and streetlights look fitting for Germany. There are no elements that would not appear here (e.g. a giant red barn)

GOOD

 

Cars

The cars look like generic European models, and would occur often in Germany. The number-plates are authentic, with the correct arrangement of city-codes, unique identifier, and blue EU-bar at the left.

The city-code “SB” is for “Solingen”, which would place this town in North Rhine-Westphalia, the most densely populated area in Germany. I cannot tell if Solingen looks like this, but it could very well be the case that the town represented would rather be any town, and not necessarily an identifiable area.

GOOD

 

Police-cars

The police-cars are green-white, as calssic police-vehicles in Germany are (at the moment they are being phased out and replaced with blue ones, but the green police-cars remain a regular sight). The lettering of “Polizei” is correct. The flashing lights on top have the correct color (blue). There even appears to be a small coat of arms on one of the vehicles.

GOOD 

Ads & Written Language

The texts shown in the ads is correct and plausible.

GOOD

Presence of Soldiers

When encountering the unknown threat a team of soldiers was sent it to investigate. The Bundeswehr does not operate with force within the borders of Germany, and even in humanitarian causes like floods and evacuations its usage is a big issue. Seeing that the alien incusion is a rather unique case I can accept a team of soldiers would be present.

OK

 

Camouflage

The camouflage of the German soldiers is not quite flecktarn, the German unique camo, but a good approximation, and not just generic “woodland camouflage”.

GOOD

 

Grenades

The last surviving soldier carries a grenade. A swat-mission in a civilian area would not carry grenades. Even among soldiers grenades are highly restricted and not given out lightly. Seeing as this is a unique sitation the presence of grenades is passable enough.

OK

Helicopter

The briefing-screen shows that a German helicopter crashed. The model of the helicopter given is the NH90, which is a vehicle which operates in Germany, and the diagram is close enough to its actual looks. The name given of the model is “Falke” (falcon), which would be a plausible name for a German helicopter-model.

GOOD

Conclusion – GOOD!

XCOM manages to represent modern Germany very well in its short introductory mission. The majority of elements used are correct or plausible enough, and there is barely anything which would distract someone with false details.

-Matthias

Also posted on Gamasutra

How to read The Circle

Spoilers.

The Circle is an important book, and I totally recommend reading it. It handles the topics of data-security and surveillance, and presents those in an accessible fashion to non-tech-people, and there are only very few of those (Little Brother also falls into this “genre”, which I recommend too, but goes into a different direction).

The problem about The Circle is that is, in parts, really dumb and frustrating.

The characters act illogically. There is an openly symbolistic subplot about a shark that goes nowhere. Everyone in this universe just goes along with what massively changing technology comes along without any regard for other human beings.

The frustrating thing is there are nuggets of truth in here, and they are important. They show how blind adherence to brogrammer mentality can displace people and effectively cast them out from society. It shows ways how adding innocently-appearing ideas into current processes without any second thoughts will have devastating results years later. It shows how our current society could end up being a dystopia without anyone noticing. Every step in this is story is conceivable, and it ends up being 1984.

My copy of the book.

So here are a few pointers:

• This is SATIRE. It is not supposed to show how rational people behave.
• There is an openly symbolistic subplot about a shark. It goes nowhere.
• The main character is really not that relatable despite being presented with all the tropes of one
• People are behaving in stupid ways to make a point about our current societal development, not because they are well-written characters

Approach this like an episode of Black Mirror, where a world is presented that went horribly wrong and everyone just goes along with it and it ends in a very depressing manner.

If you go in with this expectations it will be a much more enjoyable read.

-Matthias

Vocabulario Explosivo Sourcecode

I uploaded the sourcecode for my vocabulary-learning app!

You can enter word-pairs and test yourself on them. I made it to run on Android-devices, but there it run on desktops, iDevices and the web too.

I made this in a few days for fun, and there never was a release planned. But now you can check it out ;)

-Matthias