Starbound eBook Joe Haldeman
Download As PDF : Starbound eBook Joe Haldeman 
After the shocking first contact between humans and alien life on Mars, Carmen Dula and her husband board a tiny, long-range craft with five other humans and two Martians. They travel to a distant solar system that is home to the "Others" - an enigmatic, powerful, and possibly immortal race. Once there, they manage to find enough common purpose to forge a delicate truce between human, Martian, and Other.
By the time Carmen and her party are sent back to Earth, fifty years have passed - and the Earthlings have not been idle. They have built a massive flotilla of warships to defend Earth against the Others' expected aggression. But the Others have more power than any could imagine.
And they will brook no insolence from the upstart human race...
Starbound eBook Joe Haldeman
Joe Haldeman is one of my favorite authors, but this book is a literal (and literary) train wreck. First, every chapter is written from the first person POV of one of the characters, and it switches every (short) chapter. Half the time I had no idea which character was actually doing the 1st person narration, because Haldeman doesn't provide an ample clue via dialogue or narration. After half the book is done I started to get a feel for who was narrating, but it wasn't always obvious. Really, REALLY frustrating because I often felt lost.Secondly, the first half of the book is abysmal, involving the characters on a journey to meet the "Others." They spend the entire trip sleeping with one another, while secretly lamenting that each other's spouses are also sleeping with other people, but not changing their own behavior. It's takes a very reprehensible (and unlikable) person to do these things, then display feelings that they do...but continue to do it. It made me want to see the ship plow into a random star on the way to Wolf 25 and burned to ash so I'd never have to read about them again. The entire "free love" garbage just felt utterly disjointed, completely unnecessary, and out of place to the storytelling because it had absolutely ZERO bearing on what was happening other than to introduce some drama during the many years long journey. It read like a really bad soap opera (yes, that statement is redundant).
Thirdly, the story is driven mostly by dialogue. An overly heavy (and lazy) technique I'm not fond of, that makes a story feel like it's just a group of people sitting around a table talking the entire book. Ugh. John Scalzi is becoming guilty of this, and I no longer read his books anymore because of it.
Thankfully the second part of Starbound picks up with some actual story involving meeting Other-prime and Spy. Marsbound was a decent read, and the first part of Starbound is easily 1 star, while the second half is 3 stars (overall 2).
I hope this trilogy is somewhat salvaged with Earthbound...not holding out much hope. Unfortunately, Joe Haldeman's glory days of The Forever War are far behind him, and he's seen much better days as a writer and storyteller.
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Starbound eBook Joe Haldeman Reviews
Well, that is what I expect the title of a third book to be. This is a pretty good science fiction book, maybe even a great one, but I was crushed by the ending. Not that the ending is illogical or something that would be totally unexpected. But prospects look bleak.
As for everything else in the story, it is pretty darn good. There is a new character who is quite interesting, plus there are a couple of "Martians". There is high tension (Is this mission doomed? Are we going to screw up and get humanity blown away, or have they done it already?) Spaceships, new worlds, aliens, Oh My! Seriously good science fiction.
<later edit I have snipped out a comment about varying the acceleration when getting close to lightspeed. That took longer than I expected, so I removed the comment. My revision was prompted by a comment. (Thanks))>
Something not mentioned in the book is the sudden lack of tides and its effect. The gravitation effect of a circumscribing sphere of dust is definitely not the same as a large moon. That's a major quibble.
I feel that technical things like that Haldeman could have sorted out by talking with folks at MIT where he teaches.
BTW the effect of the onset of 1g flight on the Martians was slightly amusing, but seemed plausible, given what we already knew of their method of um, waste disposal.
Unlike another reviewer, I had little troublee figuring out who was narrating each chapter. The voices were sufficiently different to figure out within a paragraph.
I wonder if Haldeman deliberately makes the Others act like Moonboy's foster father -- extreme punishments are us. Perhaps someone will come to help us, too.
It is a great story, I had the feeling early on that this could be another Hugo winner. I just hope a third volume will relieve the situation.
This is the sequel to Marsbound. In this one, our protagonist Carmen heads off on a relativistic sublight trip to a nearby star to meet with the aliens who were behind the machinations of Marsbound.
I was a little disappointed by this one, not so much for the story itself but for some of the mechanics of how it was told. The basic story is that of the journey, i.e. the preparations, the long trip itself, and what happens once we get to the destination. Those aspects were fairly interesting and held my interest, so on the basic point of telling a good story, I'll give it good marks.
However, while Marsbound was told from the single point of view of Carmen, "the girl from Mars", Starbound is told from three separate first-person points of view two human and one Martian. I can see some justification for the choice, but it ended up confusing me frequently. I could get two or three pages into a chapter and not be sure who the current "I" was. It would have been nice if each chapter could have led off with some identification, even if it was something explicit like the character's name in the chapter heading.
The second mechanical thing that soured the book for me was something of a cheat. Telling the story of a thirteen-year round-trip voyage is hard to do without boring the reader to tears. Yet Haldeman pulled it off for the first three-and-a-half years or so. Then... I don't know, maybe he ran out of steam. Maybe he just didn't want to have to do another nine years of it, so he pulled a rabbit out of his hat and made it go away somewhat magically. He went to some length explaining why we wouldn't understand the real explanation, but it still felt like a cheat.
So, while I enjoyed the tale, I was disappointed by some of the execution. I'll probably finish off the trilogy, but I'm no longer quite so excited about it as I was after Marsbound.
Joe Haldeman is one of my favorite authors, but this book is a literal (and literary) train wreck. First, every chapter is written from the first person POV of one of the characters, and it switches every (short) chapter. Half the time I had no idea which character was actually doing the 1st person narration, because Haldeman doesn't provide an ample clue via dialogue or narration. After half the book is done I started to get a feel for who was narrating, but it wasn't always obvious. Really, REALLY frustrating because I often felt lost.
Secondly, the first half of the book is abysmal, involving the characters on a journey to meet the "Others." They spend the entire trip sleeping with one another, while secretly lamenting that each other's spouses are also sleeping with other people, but not changing their own behavior. It's takes a very reprehensible (and unlikable) person to do these things, then display feelings that they do...but continue to do it. It made me want to see the ship plow into a random star on the way to Wolf 25 and burned to ash so I'd never have to read about them again. The entire "free love" garbage just felt utterly disjointed, completely unnecessary, and out of place to the storytelling because it had absolutely ZERO bearing on what was happening other than to introduce some drama during the many years long journey. It read like a really bad soap opera (yes, that statement is redundant).
Thirdly, the story is driven mostly by dialogue. An overly heavy (and lazy) technique I'm not fond of, that makes a story feel like it's just a group of people sitting around a table talking the entire book. Ugh. John Scalzi is becoming guilty of this, and I no longer read his books anymore because of it.
Thankfully the second part of Starbound picks up with some actual story involving meeting Other-prime and Spy. Marsbound was a decent read, and the first part of Starbound is easily 1 star, while the second half is 3 stars (overall 2).
I hope this trilogy is somewhat salvaged with Earthbound...not holding out much hope. Unfortunately, Joe Haldeman's glory days of The Forever War are far behind him, and he's seen much better days as a writer and storyteller.
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