Books by author: Joe Haldeman

The Accidental Time Machine is a time-travel novel that mostly manages to avoid the paradoxes of time travel (it does a good job until the very end). It's breezily written and fast-paced, and I enjoyed it somewhat (especially the parts set at M.I.T. in the future), but it's a minor work at best.

The protagonist in Camouflage is the changeling, a being that has wandered Earth for centuries (millennia?), masquerading as various sea creatures, and finally comes ashore as a human in the early 20th century, where it struggles to learn about human nature and fit in. Also on the scene is the chameleon, a different type of creature that can instantly mimic any human male, and has done so since the dawn of human history, taking joy in the carnage of war and generally acting like a psychopathic predator. Camouflage follows their paths as they converge on an unusual (extraterrestrial?) artifact and ultimately have the inevitable confrontation.

Haldeman won the Nebula for Camouflage, and I enjoyed it a lot more than The Accidental Time Machine. Haldeman seems to have a bit of a problem with endings if these two novels are any indication. Both cut off rather abrubtly—this one with a fairly unbelievable love story (really!). Still, I had a lot of fun reading it, and I'll probably check out The Forever War, which I hear is regarded as Haldeman's best, soon.

So it turns out that this novel has almost exactly the same plot as Haldeman's The Accidental Time Machine, except it works much better (this one won the Hugo). It's a much tighter story arc (and more plausible from my limited physics background). It tells the story of Private William Mandella, a conscript in the war against the Taurans. The war takes place deep in space, and the relativistic travel speeds cause time-dilation for the soldiers. When they return home, they have aged little, but most of the people they knew have grown old and died. Each time Mandella returns from the front, Earth society has changed tremendously.

Like each of the other Haldeman novels I've read, this one becomes a love story, but here the ending is "believable" as a consequence of the story and feels more satisfying.

My sci-fi reading background is haphazard and skews pretty far away from space opera, but I'm interested in going back and reading some of the other Hugo and Nebula award winners that are regarded as classics. I think Starship Troopers will be next.