Forever Free

Forever Free is a science fiction novel by the American writer Joe Haldeman, published in 1999 as a sequel to The Forever War.

Mandella and his wife Marygay are veterans living among other veterans on a planet that nobody would choose, keeping to themselves partly because the rest of the human species is no longer recognisable to them. The posthuman group mind that most people have joined will not let the inhabitants of Middle Finger leave, since their genetic diversity is worth preserving, and so a group of them decide to take a ship and go. Their plan is to use time dilation deliberately: ten subjective years of travel would carry the colonists forty thousand years into their own future, and they hope to find a human society they can belong to. Because the group mind refuses permission, they take the ship anyway, with one member of the group mind and one of the alien Taurans aboard as observers. Something then begins to go wrong with the ship's antimatter supply, and the voyage ends with the crew abandoning the vessel and returning home far earlier than intended, in a version of their own world that neither they nor the reader is prepared for. It is a quieter book than its predecessor, and it is about what soldiers are owed after the war is over.