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Old Twentieth Joe Haldeman Books

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Old Twentieth Joe Haldeman Books

I had a hard time caring about the parts of the book that were spent in the "time machine." I mean, what was the point? They were just like when someone tells you about a dream that they had. So what?

The book didn't get interesting until about 100 pages into the story.

Then the ending was rather predictible. This was readable, but left me feeling like I had wasted my time reading it. That gets it two stars from me. Because some books just aren't even readable.


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Old Twentieth Joe Haldeman Books Reviews

Nicely written, as previous books by Joe Haldeman. The twist in the end really caught me by surprise.
I've read 3 or 4 books by him and never got disappointed. As usual he has a strong focus on battles, and on this one he describes them a little too graphically, but it's good to set the mood of what is happening to the character. If you've read previous books by Haldeman and liked, I think you won't be dissapointed by this. If this is your first book by him, I'd suggest choosing "The Forever War", which is much better, and then coming back to this if you like his style.
Part of this story picks up where Worlds enough and Time (? the 3rd in the series) left off. totally diff peeps and premise, but the background story - going on a sleeper/generation/long trip to the closest suspected extrasolar habital planet.

I have to admit I am a Haldaman fan and I read most of what he publishes. I have even sent him a few emails and used to read his newsgroup.

I liked the story - I was however more facinated with the backstory then the main story. The background is that there was a war against the elite that had recieved prolong/imortality drug and the have nots. The elites won by biowarfare destroying all non-imortals. As happens a planet was discovered within the new lifespan of man - and so man wants to go.

The story of the immoratl war, the trip thru space and that there was a problem with people losing their imortality rather unexpectidly and abrubtly was all pretty interesting. Half of the book (about) was spent in VR discovering part of the problem with the AI running the VR thru various years in the twentieth century. A good device to place our hero in various locations, didn't really detract from the story - and was something to use as a way to put a different spin on an oft told tale (The journey to another star story).

In the end however - I was left wanting to know a few details such as do they ever make it? What was causing the Immortality drug to fail? Is there a part two?

Many here on have complained about Joe's endings as being somewhat abrupt and I imagine this book falls into the same category where when it was over I was left without a feeling of completness.

Good read tho and I enjoyed it - I just wanted a little more loose ends resolved at the end.
Old Twentieth is at face value a book about the journey a bunch of immortals take to another planet. Underneath that basic plot lies a more subtle message about the desire/need that people have to live in the past.

The Earth of Old Twentieth is populated by immortals. After a process is found to give immortality a large war starts between the people who have immortality and those that don't. This war ends when an engineered biological agent called Lot 92 is released and kills all those who have not received the immortality treatment.

The protagonist of Old Twentieth is Jacob Brewer. Brewer is one of the people who lived through the immortality war and one of the first to receive the immortality treatment. Brewer is a virtual reality engineer aboard the starship Aspera that is starting a thousand year voyage to Beta Hydrii. He oversees the use and maintenance of what they call the time machine. The time machine is a virtual reality device that the crew of the Aspera use to dilute the tedium of a long voyage across the stars. At the same time it is also clear that these devices are in widespread use on Earth as well. The most popular place to visit in the time machine happens to be the twentieth century, hence the book's title.

The plot of Old Twentieth has many different pieces working within it. When immortals start dying and the apparent cause is the time machine it causes some of the crew to examine just how important the device is to them. At the same time Brewer determines that the AI that controls the time machine experience has become self aware. How he deals with that and the deaths aboard ship are central to the plot of the book.

Brewer's travels within the time machine to different times and places illustrate the effectiveness of the device at portraying another reality and at the same time provide some interesting ways for Haldeman to explore some of the greater horrors of the twentieth century. While Haldeman creates vivid past scenarios, at times their presentation is a bit jarring and feels like it breaks the flow of the novel. In most of the scenes, especially later in the novel, we find Brewer breaking the fourth wall of the time machine scenario to interact with the AI or one of his other present day counterparts.

The plot moves in fits and starts until the end when everything comes together, but the denouement doesn't have quite the kick that the end of Worlds did. It's tricky, but at the same time it's not clear that we had a real chance to see the trick coming so it feels forced. I'll say no more to avoid spoiling things.

This isn't a five star book like Worlds or the Forever War and I didn't enjoy it as much as Buying Time (another more interesting examination of immortality by Haldeman) to which I gave a four star rating. It sits at a solid three.
This book is a mess, with a several barely-connected subplots, unoriginal ideas and a meaningless ending. For example there is a 15 minutes long subplots where our heros chase down and cook a duck. That is supposed to be either funny because of their clumsiness or sad because cutting down the duck reminds them of the autopsy of a friend who got snuffed at the holodeck a bit earlier. Yes, much of the book is spent exploring computer simulations of various randomly selected battles in the twentieth century, which has no connection to either the spaceship they are on or to each other. I was left with a feeling that the author was browsing random Wikipedia articles while writing those stories.

In the end ****oh, plot spoiler****, the computer predictably becomes self-aware, our hero discovers that it was all a dream within a dream, and is thus left wondering if he is still inside the matrix. I still give it two stars and not one, because both the writing and characterization are actually quite good.
I had a hard time caring about the parts of the book that were spent in the "time machine." I mean, what was the point? They were just like when someone tells you about a dream that they had. So what?

The book didn't get interesting until about 100 pages into the story.

Then the ending was rather predictible. This was readable, but left me feeling like I had wasted my time reading it. That gets it two stars from me. Because some books just aren't even readable.