Joe Haldeman
Photo by Gay Haldeman

Joe Haldeman was born in Oklahoma City in 1943, and raised in Anchorage, Alaska, and Washington, D.C. The recipient of a B.S. in Astronomy from the University of Maryland and an M.F.A. in creative writing from the University of Iowa, he served in the U.S. Army from 1967-1969 as a combat engineer. Stationed in the central Vietnam highlands, he was severely injured and received the Purple Heart. His first novel, War Year (1972), which draws from his own wartime diary, follows Private John Farmer through a year of service in Vietnam. Haldeman turned to science fiction for his second novel, The Forever War (1975), about galactic soldiers in combat and the difficulties they face in their preparations to return to an Earth that has aged thousands of years while they have aged only a few. The Forever War received the two most prestigious science fiction honors, the Hugo and Nebula awards. Since then, Haldeman has written more than 15 books, including Mindbridge (1976), All My Sins Remembered (1977), World Without End: A Star Trek Novel (1979), The Hemingway Hoax (1990), 1968: A Novel (1994), Forever Peace (1997), Forever Free (1999), and Guardian (2002). He divides his time between Gainesville, Florida, and Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he is an adjunct professor in the Writing and Humanistic Studies Program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

"Tonight we're going to show you eight silent ways to kill a man." The guy who said that was a sergeant who didn’t look five years older than me. So if he’d ever killed a man in combat, silently or otherwise, he’d done it as an infant.

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