Joe William Haldeman was born in Oklahoma City in 1943 and studied physics and astronomy at the University of Maryland. He was drafted in 1967, served in Vietnam as a combat engineer with the 4th Infantry Division, and was severely wounded in 1968, receiving the Purple Heart.
That experience produced The Forever War, published in 1974 after being rejected by numerous publishers who found it too bleak. It won the Hugo, the Nebula, and the Locus awards, which is close to a clean sweep, and it remains one of the small number of science fiction novels that people outside the genre read.
Its device, in which relativistic travel means each tour of duty costs the soldier decades or centuries at home, makes the alienation of a returning veteran literal and measurable in a way realist fiction cannot.
He returned to the material repeatedly. Forever Peace, published in 1997, is not a sequel but a thematic companion and won the Hugo, Nebula, and John W. Campbell Memorial Award. Forever Free, in 1999, is a direct continuation. The 1968 novel War Year and the later 1968 draw on his tour more directly.
Outside the war novels he has written The Hemingway Hoax, Camouflage, The Accidental Time Machine, and a substantial body of short fiction, and he has won five Hugos and five Nebulas across his career.
He taught writing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for more than thirty years, where generations of science fiction writers passed through his workshops, and he was named a Grand Master by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America in 2010. He is also a painter and a poet, and has published a verse collection.
He married Mary Gay Potter in 1965 and they remained together until her death. He has spoken about the difficulty of writing about combat honestly for an audience that mostly wants either heroism or condemnation, and his work consistently refuses both.
Joe Haldeman
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