Take the horrors of the Vietnam War, combine them with an advanced state of virtual reality where human soldiers control their soldierboys -- or mechanical soldiers -- remotely, and throw in a new hi-tech weapon that threatens to end life as we know it, and you have Joe Haldeman's latest creation, Forever Peace.

As Haldeman himself explains before beginning this novel, Forever Peace is not a continuation of his 1975 book, The Forever War (which won the Hugo, Nebula and Ditmar Awards). Rather, it is an extended look at some of that novel's problems that did not exist (mainly due to technological advances of the last two decades) at the time it was written.