Forever Peace

Forever Peace is a science fiction novel by the American writer Joe Haldeman, published in 1997. It won the Nebula, the Hugo and the John W. Campbell Memorial awards in 1998, and although its title echoes The Forever War it is not a sequel to it.

The war in the book is fought with remotely operated combat machines called soldierboys. The mechanics who pilot them have sockets implanted in their skulls that link them both to the machine and to one another, so that they experience what the robots sense and can read the thoughts of the other mechanics who are connected at the same time. Julian Class is a physicist and a mechanic both.

Julian works on the Jupiter Project, a particle accelerator built by nanobots in orbit around the planet, and he also serves in a conflict that has no end because the advanced nations hold a monopoly on the manufacturing technology that makes it cheap to fight. When he learns what the outcome of the Jupiter Project could be, he is faced with the question of what a physicist can do about it, and the novel moves between his narration and an anonymous voice commenting on his life.