HackerNews Readings: The Forever War

All Time Past 6 Months

How to Lie with Statistics

Darrell Huff and Irving Geis

4.5 on Amazon

8 HN comments

Game Programming Patterns

Robert Nystrom

4.8 on Amazon

8 HN comments

An Elegant Puzzle: Systems of Engineering Management

Will Larson

4.5 on Amazon

8 HN comments

The Federalist Papers

Alexander Hamilton and James Madison

4.6 on Amazon

8 HN comments

Calculus Made Easy

Silvanus P. Thompson and Martin Gardner

4.5 on Amazon

8 HN comments

Capital in the Twenty-First Century

Thomas Piketty, Arthur Goldhammer - translator, et al.

4.5 on Amazon

8 HN comments

The Black Swan: Second Edition: The Impact of the Highly Improbable: With a new section: "On Robustness and Fragility" (Incerto)

Nassim Nicholas Nicholas Taleb

4.5 on Amazon

8 HN comments

The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion

Jonathan Haidt and Gildan Media, LLC

4.6 on Amazon

8 HN comments

The Unicorn Project

Gene Kim

4.6 on Amazon

8 HN comments

The Communist Manifesto

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels

4.3 on Amazon

7 HN comments

Atlas Shrugged

Ayn Rand

4.5 on Amazon

7 HN comments

The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure

Jonathan Haidt, Greg Lukianoff, et al.

4.7 on Amazon

7 HN comments

Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code (2nd Edition) (Addison-Wesley Signature Series (Fowler))

Martin Fowler

4.7 on Amazon

7 HN comments

The Forever War

Joe Haldeman, George Wilson, et al.

4.4 on Amazon

7 HN comments

Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder

Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Joe Ochman, et al.

4.5 on Amazon

7 HN comments

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linspaceonMay 13, 2021

The book that comes to my mind is the awesome "The Forever War", a classic.

coupdejarnaconMay 13, 2021

Seconded. I read The Forever War and Ender's Game for the first time, back to back. The Forever War is superior in every way.

renke1onJuly 23, 2021

* Seveneves (I haven't read much else from Neal Stephenson, but I've heard good things)

* Children of Time / Children of Ruin (both really good)

* Remembrance of Earth's Past (even the fan fiction one is good)

* A lot of stuff from Alastair Reynolds (House of Suns being my favorite)

* Classics like Tau Zero, The Forever War etc.

* A Deepness in the Sky / A Fire Upon the Deep

Although not all of these are strictly considered hard scifi, I guess.

Btw, I love it when somebody asks this question every now and then on HN. Lots of stuff for one's (ever growing) reading list.

throw1234651234onJuly 23, 2021

Neal Stephenson's earlier work has "more soul" - Snow Crash / Diamond Age actually has characters you care about and like, his later novels get increasingly more abstract, though even better in the technical sense. I think the only character I remember from Seveneves is the cannibal leader, that's it.

"A Deepness in the Sky" was REALLY good. The Forever War was good for the concept.

In short, yours looks like a great list I will come back to, thank you.

However, I do strongly dislike Remembrance of Earth's Past / The Three Body Problem - it's vastly overrated in my opinion and the characters make no sense. The best part of it was the intro to the first book which gave an interesting glimpse at history.

eesmithonAug 10, 2021

... what? It's been part of SF for decades.

The first three that come to mind are: Heinlein's "Time for the Stars", Haldeman's "The Forever War", and Anderson's "Tau Zero".

From those titles, a DDG search finds http://sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/relativity listing more, also containing the line "Very many sf stories use relativistic time dilation for one-way Time Travel into the future."

sandebertonMay 11, 2021

When I'd studied physics, they thought the duration of a collapsar jump was exactly zero. But a couple of centuries later, they did a complicated wave-guide experiment that proved the jump actually lasted some small fraction of a nanosecond. Doesn't seem like much, but they'd had to rebuild physics from the foundation up when the collapsar jump was first discovered; they had to rear the whole damned thing down again when they found out it took time to get from A to B. Physicists were still arguing about it.

The Forever War (1974) by Joe Haldeman

snowwrestleronAug 10, 2021

In The Forever War by Joe Haldeman, soldiers are sent out on relativistic journeys to fight a war with aliens. Each time they come back, Earth culture has changed, and eventually it becomes unrecognizable to the soldiers, and Earthlings forget or stop caring about the war.

It was an allegory for the U.S. involvement in the war in Vietnam, in which Haldeman fought.