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Let me tell you about Joe Haldeman, the man who taught me how to cook bacon.
Bacon has always been very important in my life. When I was a small boy at school umpty ump years ago, we had a “Thank You” book in which we were supposed to show off our brand new skills with joined together letters by writing down all the things we wanted to thank God for. The teacher gave us a few suggestions—trees and animals, our parents, our school—and all the little sycophants wrote down twee things that they would squirm with exquisite embarrassment over today if their secret was ever revealed.
I wrote:
Thank you God for lovely liver and bacon and all the thick gravy that goes with it that you soak up with your mashed potato.
I’m not sure how the teacher kept a straight face, but she did, and she showed the entry proudly to my parents at the next open day and all the rest of my life my parents have pulled my leg about it unmercifully. Oddly, though, I’ve never felt the slightest shame or embarrassment about it. I meant it when I wrote it and I still mean it now. Bacon is very important.
It shouldn’t be overcooked, but it must be very crisp with the fat just the right shade of golden brown. The texture should be slightly brittle, and the flavour should explode like a taste bomb in your mouth. That’s proper bacon.
In the introduction to a story called Summer’s Lease in a short story collection called Infinite Dreams, Joe Haldeman wrote:
…an infallible method for cooking perfect bacon every time. Cook it in the nude. This trains you to keep the heat down so it won’t stick or splatter, and it can’t burn.
When I read this, I knew that here was a man I could admire without fear or favour. Us bacon fetishists have to stick together. I tried his recipe, and it worked. Instant hero-worship!
This wasn’t the first time I had come across Joe Haldeman’s name. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Brian Aldiss and Harry Harrison were editing a series of books called The Year’s Best SF. As the name implies, the books were annuals, and in Number 6, published in 1973, there appeared a 64 page novella called Hero by a new writer called Joe Haldeman. In their introduction, Aldiss and Harrison wrote:
In 1968 Joe Haldeman was on combat duty in Vietnam, an experience that he drew upon for War Year, a close-to-autobiographical novel about that experience which has just been published in the United States. Now here is Hero, the story of a future war which is frighteningly real, frighteningly possible.
The story was a first person account of a soldier in training. He would soon be going to fight the Taurans—nasty aliens. About three quarters of the story concerned the training that this soldier was receiving and the last quarter detailed his first action against the aliens. It was a ho-hum story in some ways—the plot details were standard SF fare. But the style of the telling was very attention grabbing. It was cynical, shot through with black humour, and half way down the second page were lines that raised my eyebrows up into my hairline (there was more of it in those days), made me laugh out loud and turned me into a lifelong Haldeman fan (a Haldemaniac, so to speak):
“Any more questions?” Nobody raised their hand.
“OK—Tench-hut!” We staggered upright and he looked at us expectantly.
“Fuck you, sir,” came the tired chorus.
“Louder!”
“FUCK YOU SIR!” One of the army’s less-inspired morale devices.
The story finished far too soon for my liking, but a little note at the end, from a fictional book called Human History, A Hundred Scans (Baldwin, Sed 3, 2019 SA) pointed out that:
… the following descriptions are excerpted from The Forever War, the autobiography of William Mandella, one of four soldiers who through time dilation, experienced the full 1200 years of war …
There was obviously going to be more, and I wanted it now.
A whole year later, Harrison and Aldiss published The Year’s Best Science Fiction No. 7 and there was We are Very Happy Here which was described as the sequel to Hero. The same style and humour, though the hero was tempered by his experiences. He was a sergeant now and more drawn and weary. Time dilation is having its effect and the Earth he returns to is starting to seem more and more strange to him as society moves into an odd new future that he hasn’t grown up with and doesn’t really understand. He feels dislocated and is generally regarded with contempt by those whose natural milieu this is.
The story was a little more introspective, and there were obvious hints about the sorts of things that were to come. I was intrigued. This thing was turning into so much more than a superficial plot outline would suggest. There was real depth here, real meat, and I desperately wanted to see how this new writer would handle the material.
A year later when The Year’s Best Science Fiction No. 8 was published, I picked it straight off the bookshelves, bought it without even opening it and rushed it home.
There was nothing in it by Joe Haldeman. I was angry!
I’m not sure if there ever was a Year’s Best Science Fiction No. 9. Certainly there was never a number 10. It seemed I would never find out how the whole thing turned out.
Then early in 1976 I was in London on a business trip and I popped into my favourite science fiction bookstore. It was called Dark They Were and Golden Eyed (named after a story by Ray Bradbury). It was in Soho, in Berwick Street, and it was virtually the only shop on the whole street that wasn’t a sex shop or a dirty book shop. I always made a point of going there when I was in London and I always timed my business meetings so that I had time to browse through whatever the shop had in stock before I had to catch the train home.
The shop is long gone now (largely, I suspect, because nobody could ever find enough room to write “Dark They Were and Golden Eyed” on a cheque), but over the years I spent far more money with them than I could afford. (I had a credit card—who needed cheques?)
This particular day they had a huge display in the window. Vast piles of The Forever War by Joe Haldeman. I still have the book. The cover shows a man in a space suit sitting down on nothing at all. Resting across his lap is a cutlass in a scabbard. Behind him, vaguely drawn clockwork mechanisms tick and hands on clock faces show different times. The title is displayed in a lurid day-glo green in very large letters (with the name of the author in very small black capitals). The blurb calls it “A dazzling and powerful science fiction Catch-22” and an excerpt from the New York Times proclaims it to be “A Vastly Entertaining Trip!”
All these things were almost guaranteed to turn people off. The author was unknown, the cover was silly in the extreme and the green letters were sickening. If I hadn’t already read those two excerpts in the Aldiss and Harrison anthologies, I never would have picked it up. But I had, and I did and it was even better than I’d hoped it would be. This man was obviously somebody to watch out for.
And I still didn’t know we had bacon in common.
It is almost impossible to get decent bacon in New Zealand. Almost invariably it is undercooked—barely shown to the frying pan or the grill. It comes out wet and soggy. The fat is translucent and it leaks fluid. The lean is often greyish and the whole thing tends to be lukewarm. It tastes slimy and is very unappetising. In a recently published travel book (Tramp Royale) Robert Heinlein says much the same thing about New Zealand bacon. I always knew there was a good reason why I liked his stories so much. Us bacon fetishists can recognise one another at a hundred paces with the gas under the frying pan turned down.
The sausages aren’t up to much either…
Once, on a visit to New Zealand, Harlan Ellison was warned not to order the sausages for breakfast. Never one to ignore a challenge like this, he immediately ordered sausages—but he lived to regret it. The New Zealand sausage is dire, and like the bacon is generally undercooked and oozing goo. The only decent sausages in New Zealand must be bought from a delicatessen and are made by Europeans.
I’ve never been able to make up my mind whether it is just the sausages themselves that are inedible or whether it is the method of cooking that makes them so. Certainly there isn’t much wrong with the bacon when you take proper care with the cooking of it. But no matter how much I try, I’ve had very little success with cooking the average NZ banger.
The next Joe Haldeman book I came across was a novel called Mindbridge. It concerned the investigation into reports of alien presences in the region of the star Achernar. Again a very standard SF plot, but again the telling of the tale was what mattered rather than the tale itself.
It represented a radical departure from what had gone before (in terms of style anyway) since the author chose to tell his tale using the stylistic tricks developed by John Dos Passos for his USA novels. John Brunner had successfully borrowed the same style for Stand on Zanzibar and The Sheep Look Up. I was never all that fond of Mindbridge. Technically speaking the style was faultless and the sections dovetailed together well. But I felt a little let down—the book just never seemed BIG enough; neither in length nor in subject matter. I think perhaps there wasn’t enough material. Maybe I’d been spoiled by Brunner’s enormous books and by Dos Passos himself (USA is quite a monumental work even though it is made up of smaller novels). I think I’d have liked Mindbridge a lot more if there had been three times as much of it, and a lot broader canvas. (It felt claustrophobic at times.)
Meanwhile I kept eating bacon, and so too, I trust, did Joe. I’ve been a bacon fanatic since early childhood. Every year the family would go for our summer holiday to a small fishing village on the Northumberland coast. It was called Cullercoats. We always stayed at The Bay Hotel. The very first time we went there (I think I was about four years old) we went in to breakfast and there was only one rasher of bacon on my plate. My face puckered up and I turned to my father. He knew exactly what was wrong and immediately summoned a waitress and explained how much I liked my bacon. My plate was whisked away and came back piled high with lovely crispy bacon. Much to the waitresses’ surprise, I ate it all; every scrap. That was all the encouragement they needed. For the rest of the holiday they plied me with bacon. (I think they had a competition among themselves to see who could fill me up. They all lost.)
Every year after that, when we returned, they immediately remembered me and my fetish without having to be told. I thoroughly enjoyed my holidays in Cullercoats, though they were so long ago that I remember virtually nothing about them except for the bacon. Isn’t it odd, the memories of childhood that stay with us?
It is more than thirty years since I was last in The Bay Hotel, but somehow I just know deep inside that if I was to walk in there tomorrow they would immediately sit me down and feed me bacon. One needs these little certainties in life.
After Mindbridge, Joe Haldeman found himself in the position of having written a phenomenally successful novel (The Forever War) and was beginning to suffer from critics who kept telling him that his latest book was nowhere near as good as that first one. He isn’t the only author that has happened to. If you listen to the critics, Joseph Heller has never written anything as good as Catch-22 and Robert Pirsig’s new book Lila is currently being compared unfavourably with Zen and the Art of Motor Cycle Maintenance. There is only one way out of this vicious circle and that is to write something demonstrably better than the first icon they keep comparing you with. In between bacon sandwiches, Joe wrote Worlds (1981), Worlds Apart (1983) and Worlds Enough and Time (1992)—a trilogy of novels which I think are the best things he has written to date. Trapped again! Now the critics have new standards of comparison. What comes next?
The books are about the life of Marianne O’Hara, a citizen of the Worlds—orbiting colonies above the Earth. We see her on Earth, in the colonies, on Earth again after the holocaust and finally on a ship sent to colonise a planet of another star. Yet again there is nothing special about the elements making up the tale. It is all standard SF fare. But Joe Haldeman’s special genius is that he can take these stock elements down off the shelf and like a great chef who uses all the same ingredients that we do, he can cook a gourmet meal with them. All we get when we try it is bacon sandwiches. (And the infuriating thing is that he does better bacon sandwiches than we do as well.) This is called skill and talent.
Normally I hate trilogies. If a book tells me that it is volume one of a new series I generally refuse to buy it on principle. Either the thing will be rotten (in which case buying it is a waste of money) or it will be good in which case life becomes unbearably frustrating because the chances are subsequent volumes haven’t been written yet (let alone published!) and I can’t stand the nervous tension of waiting to see what happens next. Therefore I virtually never buy series books until all of them are available. Of course, the publishers conspire against me and by the time volumes two and three appear, volume one is generally out of print and is quite unobtainable. Consequently, because of such asinine publishing practices, the number of series books that I have on my shelves is vanishingly small. I’m sure I’m not the only book buyer who does this—if publishers would only make sure that when a series is complete all the volumes are in print and available (preferably in matching editions, though I don’t insist on this) I’m sure they would sell more copies. There are days when I am more than half convinced that publishers go out of their way to sell as few books as they possibly can. Their marketing practices seem deliberately designed to minimise their sales!
Anyway, for some reason that escapes me now, I broke this rule with the Worlds trilogy. I bought the books as they appeared and I made a very interesting discovery. It was not necessary to have read earlier books to enjoy and appreciate the current book.
This was a real eye-opener. Another reason I have for disliking series so much is that if I do read book one, a year later when book two appears I find that I have forgotten all the intimate little details of the first book (though I generally have retained the broad plot outline) and book two depends so much on these details and nuances that taken alone it makes no sense whatsoever. The blurb will often insist that the book is complete in itself and stands alone, but generally this is a bare-faced lie. I suspect that Joe Haldeman not only shares my love of bacon, he also shares my dislike of this particular practice because the Worlds books are beautifully crafted so that they really do stand alone and the long gap between their publishing dates is therefore not important. It is best to read them in order (though it is certainly not necessary) but you most definitely do not have to reread earlier ones in order to appreciate later ones. I wish more authors would pay attention to this point. There are several seemingly never ending series that I have now completely given up on because I’m damned if I’m going to go back and reread nine books simply in order to figure out who is doing what to whom and why in book ten. It isn’t worth the effort. Roger Zelazny, Piers Anthony and George Martin please note.
So where does Joe Haldeman stand in the SF field? How to judge him? Obviously I’m biased (how could I criticise a bacon buddy?) but it seems to me that he has produced two outstandingly brilliant works (The Forever War and the Worlds trilogy), a technically brilliant but ultimately disappointing novel (Mindbridge) an outstanding work of literary scholarship (the short novel The Hemingway Hoax) and a lot of thoroughly enjoyable short stories and novels that never really amounted to more than just thoroughly enjoyable short stories and novels.
That is no mean achievement in itself (a lot of writers would give their floppy disk for as much), and I own virtually all of his books (at least half of them I bought in hardback, which I think speaks for itself). The only ones I do not own are a few that were published under pseudonyms which I didn’t find out about until long after they had gone out of print, and that first novel War Year which I have never seen and which I would give a lot to read. I would be particularly interested to see how it compares to the plethora of Vietnam novels that have appeared in the last few years; ever since it became politically correct to write about that sad and misguided conflict. How does a Vietnam novel from circa 1970 stand up in 1992?
I have never found a Joe Haldeman story to be less than entertaining. I wish I could say the same for some of his contemporaries. Also, unlike many of his contemporaries, he is not all that prolific. This is, in my view, a virtue rather than a vice. I would much rather have a small body of carefully thought out and invariably entertaining books than a welter of dross with the occasional gold nugget.
I feel hungry. I wonder if there’s any bacon in the fridge…
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