Haldeman as seer

On this fine Sunday in time for the Texans / Broncos game, I drove up to Breck and here finished Joe Haldeman's The Forever War. I wish I'd read it in 1998.

I mean of course I should have read it long before that, but 1998 was when I read Starship Troopers. There's no excuse for reading one and not the other. Both authors Served; both books know the score. Although I'll rate Haldeman's score higher as dealing with the civilian side, where Heinlein flat doesn't hold civilians as worthy of an opinion.

I get the impression from Haldeman that he doesn't respect civilians either, given how he depicts civilian society. We're criminals and/or decadents. Haldeman's edge is that he argues the point where Heinlein just says "whatever; just pay your taxes, pleb".

As for the Future as seen from the middle 1970s:

Haldeman called it that we'd be finding dwarf-planets pretty soon. He also called it that the next one would be named "Charon". And that an interstellar military would prefer a further Kuiper body than Pluto, which journey cannot use Neptune for grav-assist - a nonPlutino can.

Unfortunately JH didn't call that Pluto would get that dwarf-planet, as in fact a near-twinned moon. So his "Charon" is out at, what, 80 AU and has a Mercury-like size and gravity. Honestly I think that even in the 1970s Haldeman should have guessed that ice-rich dwarf planets should be Tritonlikes with low density. But, back then, everyone was still banging on about Pluto's effects upon Neptune. Some thought Pluto was an aberration (we see echoes in Mass Effect's mass-driver); Haldeman represents the side which assumed that Pluto would be followed up by bigger Plutones out in the Kuiper. This can be fixed by positing a Marslike even further than 80 AU, or else setting the whole scene on Eris allowing for low-grav.

Haldeman also called that the world's dominant governments would be subsidising homosexuality as population-control, and that we'd be Malthusian - by 2025ish. Here he was optimistic; we've been there for some time now. Haldeman doesn't express an opinion that we should be Malthusian given our energy capabilities - overtly. Haldeman's book implies that much of this is a racket, excused by the Forever War (a theme he borrows from "Orwell" Blair). We don't have Taurians for our excuse but we do have other bogeymen.