The Forever War by Joe Haldeman

The conventional wisdom on this book pigeonholes it as a response to Robert Heinlein’s Starship Troopers. According to this interpretation, Haldeman’s 1974 anti-war tale is a corrective to the fascist militarism of Heinlein’s 1959 novel.

One might call this the “whig approach” to literary criticism – something akin to what Herbert Butterfield once called…