Vietnam and Other Alien Worlds

The author of The Forever War presents a collection of writings ranging from our past in Southeast Asia to our future among the stars.

Nebula and Hugo Award–winning author Joe Haldeman burst onto the literary scene with the hugely popular novel The Forever War, but his career also took off on the strength of his short fiction. This brilliant collection brings together examples of his science fiction as well as his writing on Vietnam—and reveals the inexorable connections between the two.

The works included in Vietnam and Other Alien Worlds are united by its title essay, in which Haldeman explains how his past informs his envisioned futures. One of these futures is a grouping of four stories from the Confederación universe, which includes his novels All My Sins Remembered and There Is No Darkness. An anthropological expedition goes awry as a research team’s subjects become murderous, and trade negotiations fall apart, comically lost in translation. The collection closes with one of Haldeman’s most affective works about Vietnam—the moving narrative poem “DX.”

Vietnam and Other Alien Worlds proves to be an anthology as versatile and multifaceted as the author who wrote it.

This ebook features an illustrated biography of Joe Haldeman including rare images from the author’s personal collection.